Too Nice for Such Brutality
by Cheb
Summary: ON HIATUS TIL WINTER 2019 Blood! So much blood! The kindhearted half-Genie's resolve is tested by matchless brutality of a real, not family-friendly Hell while unending hordes of rabid beasts test her battle mastery. The titular heroine of "Shantae and Pirate's Curse" has to go through Extermination Day Campaign of Brutal DooM v 21.
1. A Wrong Turn

**Too Nice for Such Brutality**  
by Cheb

Shantae was created by and belongs to Matt Bozon and WayForward. DooM II was created by id software and belongs to Bethesda. Brutal DooM mod is being created by Sergeant Mark IV

(シーンブレイク)

Русскую версию ищите на фикбуке, озаглавлена "Слишком добрая для подобных зверств".

 **Chapter 1,  
A Wrong Turn**

"Whew, that was easier than I had feared," Shantae said wiping sweat from her brow. The huge cavern was still echoing with the rumble of Dagron's fall, the massively misspelled monstrosity having been proven no match for the nimble girl in a red belly-dancer outfit.

Granted, dodging the huge flail on the tip of the monster's tail gave a few harrowing near misses, and reaching the flapping dragon — misspelled, remember? — required clever maneuvering and acrobatics, but in the end the boss fell, whipped into unconsciousness with the girl's impressive ponytail of full, shiny purple hair.

And she still had about half of her supplies left, from food to healing potions and auto-potions to one-use scrolls of bubble and super pike ball: her magic genie half having had been ripped out of her, she now had to rely on items, just like any other humans.

There was one last rumble from the conveniently placed abyss shrouded with haze of reddish glow, sparks of glowing-hot ashes floating up on an updraft of hot air. Was there real lava down there? Shantae was mildly curious, because, to be honest, all the "lava" she encountered so far looked more like molten resin: near-transparent orange goo with bubbles visible under its surface as they were making its way up.

Sighing, the girl trudged towards the exit, psyching herself for a long, arduous trip back: the dungeon she was currently in, the Oubilette of Suffering, was hidden deep below the Village of Lost Souls, which was itself tucked away in the darkest recesses of the Mud Bog Island. And each of these three stretches was choke-full of strong monsters. Stone golems big and small, all kinds of tar creatures, archers and bugs firing their deadly volleys... Not to mention the Village itself, swarming with Grim Reapers and abnormally strong Nagas.

To think of it, that Village dungeon felt... A bit otherworldy, Shantae thought as she, with a practiced motion, dodged a stream of flame erupting from an unassuming floor plate. Unsurprising, being a place where souls resided, the entrance blocked by a strong guardian. Wait, she thought jumping over billowing flames to latch onto an uncomfortably hot iron chain. Did that make this dungeon, being even deeper and, well, much hotter, Hell? She climbed up the chain jumping onto adjacent one to dodge a four-leaf of spinning blades. Oh. That made too much sense for comfort. Especially considering the epithet "of suffering". She climbed up onto a ledge leading to a long corridor that ended with a drop to a narrow platform surrounded with the boiling not-lava. Unfortunately, backtracking was too easy to distract from uncomfortable thoughts, even as Shantae jumped down to the platform, simply jumping over two small golems who morphed into invulnerable balls trying to ram her.

The ever-present smell of sulfur wasn't helping.

Gliding over a deadly hot expanse on a magical pirate hat, the girl had a sinking suspicion that the fancy, incomprehensible word "oubilette" meant simply "earth prison". So, "the earth prison of suffering", or, in less fancy words, Hell. Or wait, she heard once that the number of hells was infinite, each radically different. Still... She involuntarily remembered her every misdeed. Not that she wasn't trying her best to be nice, but... temper. Yeah. It was sometimes so hard to refrain from hitting certain irritating someones!

Suddenly, the girl froze at a junction. Were those sounds of a Tinkerbat scuttling beyond that corner? To think of it, after each boss battle so far there was a Tinkerbat with a map to the next island! Dashing towards the corner, she rounded it... Only to find a dead end, the corridor ending after some distance in a blank wall.

Squinting in suspicion, she entered the dead end, her steps light and cautious. Traps...? None. Hidden doors...? Unlikely. But the stones of the floor seemed weakened. Aha! Without much ado Shantae pulled the pirate scimitar out of her subspace pocket to mount it, pogoing on the oversized blade tip down. After a couple hits, the floor gave way plunging her into a spaceous hall.

Shantae blinked in surprise. Not only was there no trace of a Tinkerbat, this room was unlike anything she encountered before. The walls were deep, rich crimson encircled in irregular net of thick golden veins, illuminated brightly with five tall bronze torches, one in each corner of the hall. The ceiling and floor were green marble, now sporting a hole and a pile of rubble accordingly.

There was nothing else here except a small round dais in the center, resembling a giant wrought iron button with crimson top.

Shantae approached cautiously to poke at the mysterious object with the scimitar. It wasn't giving and appeared solid. The red top looked like leather, an unfamiliar symbol of a five-pointed star embossed into it. Maybe it was a platform to float up or down...? She whipped it with her hair. No reaction, it wasn't suddenly turning over to show its spiky underbelly. So, a pressure plate, then? She tried pushing with the scimitar but it wasn't giving. What if she put her entire weight on it?

Shantae stepped onto the alleged pressure plate, wary in case it fell away under her weight.

A sudden green flash blinded her, her body spasming from electric discharges that rolled across it with a sound not unlike running water.

Shantae jumped back, taking a combat stance, only to bump her back against rough stone wall. But there shouldn't be a...! Then the stench hit her like a physical blow. Oh merciful spirits, carrion and sulfur and rotting fish with a dash of clogged public lavatory on a hot day...

Gagging, the girl took a frantic look around. She was in a modest-sized hall carved out of bedrock, illuminated with a single torch. There was a magical circle where she had been warped to, its orange lines fading rapidly until it disappeared to nothingness. Leaving only roughly hewn stone floor.

That was no button! That was a warp platform!

Panicking, Shantae began the Zombie Caravan warp dance, the only one she knew for sure, only to realize she had no Genie magic anymore. No transforming into a monkey or an elephant. No warping out.

Gulping nervously, the indomitable girl pinched her nose shut and began exploring. It just wasn't in her nature to despair, even as fear of unknown was clawing at her. At least it was cool here, or at least felt so after the oppressive heat of the Oubilette.

There were two corridors leading out of this hall. She listened carefully, holding her breath. One was silent, but there were faint noises from the other one, like something tearing wetly. Shivering, the former half-Genie decided to check the silent corridor first. It ended shortly with a stone slab, scratch marks showing it was obviously a door, but there were no means of opening it.

Exhausting all ideas of where a hidden switch could be, Shantae was forced to check the other corridor. This one was making a turn at a right angle, faint light and the disturbing sounds coming from beyond the bend. Dreading of what she'd see there, the girl cautiously peeked across the corner.

This corridor ended in a small room, most of it occupied with a large stone altar and a huge, horned... person? standing in front of it, their back turned towards her. The massive creature was more than twice her height, its upper torso resembling a man ripped with muscle, the animalistic legs covered with darker fur having their knees backwards, ending in massive hooves instead of feet.

This... This was not good. The altar, multitude of candles atop it the only light source, was soaked in blood, the dark red liquid dripping viscously down its sides. The horned creature was arranging something on the altar, tearing and pulling and placing carefully. Were these... chunks of meat...? And... guts...?

And then she saw bodies on the floor, shrouded by darkness. Men and some sort of spiky apes, all mutilated horribly, shredded and gutted!

The sound of Shantae parting with her lunch was enough to attract the horned creature's attention. It turned around, its face a sneering snout, something between a goat and a boar with thick horns of a ram. Seeing the girl, it let out a deafening, inhuman roar, its eyes glowing with primal hatred, its bloodied hands beginning to glow green.

Weak from shock, she still had enough presence of mind to dodge a bolt of green flames that clipped the corner to explode against the other wall in a wave of scorching heat, leaving a glowing hot patch on the rock.

Shantae gulped, backing away into the hall where she would have to stand her ground. That blast was... powerful. One hit, and she'd be done for. Backing to the center of the hall, she took a combat stance, bouncing nervously on the balls of her feet. The hall was suddenly so small it was claustrophobic. Heavy clops were coming closer. Deciding this was wrong time to hoard supplies, the girl downed her last bottle of Monster Milk, a faint purplish glow surrounding her. Then she used one scroll of Super Pike Ball, three magical projectiles appearing to begin orbit her. Please, please let this be enough!

The towering monstrosity was content to be approaching in an unhurried walk as it rounded the corner. Up front, with better illumination, it looked even more fearsome, the massive muscles of its torso rippling, its eyes conveying only one thought: rip and tear.

Unable to withstand the fear of anticipation any longer, Shantae attacked first, closing in because her only weapons were her hair and the pike balls. There was no room to gain momentum for the unstoppable scimitar dash and she was convinced that using the pirate pistol would only insult the boss, enraging it further.

Because this mass of physical prowess and dreadful killing intent couldn't be anything but a boss!

Making one testing slash at its leg — she'd only be able to hit its torso if she jumped — Shantae slid back as the monstrosity retaliated with a mighty swing of its clawed hand trailing green flames.

That, too, would be one-hit kill if it connected. Wary, the girl surveyed her handiwork. Her hair only left a small cut bleeding green blood while the effects from the pike balls weren't even visible in the dark fur.

Keeping her distance invited more green bolts: the creature flung two with gusto, first with its right hand then with its left. Dodging was hard, these moved very fast, faster than any magical projectiles she dealt with before. Steeling herself, Shantae closed in again. The enemy anticipated her, swinging its right arm. She slowed down for a moment to let it pass, massive like a spiky battering ram whipping past her face. She then closed the distance to whip twice before retreating, the retaliatory swing missing her wide.

It wasn't really hard, this brute was relatively slow and utterly predictable, and she had some room to maneuver. If only she wasn't scared so much, one botched dodge was all that separated her from joining that pile of broken bodies!

A dozen whips later the creature was wounded, grunting in pain but still attacking relentlessly. She tried to exploit their difference in height, crouching low and whipping at its lower legs. It retaliated by stomping, the stone chips flying from its hoof stinging her bare skin as she dodged barely. Still, she was slowly but surely chipping its health away, more and more green blood marring the dark fur of its legs, dashing in and out, dancing around the hall.

The monster milk effect ran out, her hair whip returning to its normal strength. The bleeding, growling boss was still chasing her.

The super pike ball spell ran out leaving her with only her hair whip. The boss was still chasing her, unstoppable and implacable.

Shantae's breath grew ragged, her body soaked with sweat, her muscles burning. The limping boss was still chasing her, its legs a bloody mess. Even Dagron hadn't been this tough!

She was at the precipice of despair, her dodges growing sloppy, only her luck saving her, when she noticed the boss slowing down, its swings growing weaker.

Finding her second breath, Shantae attacked furiously. Three whips per retaliatory swing. Four whips. Five. Finally, the monstrosity let out a bleating rattle, its body giving out on it, to collapse listlessly, its meaty arms limp, its maw opening to show mismatched teeth, goatlike incisors next to canine fangs.

Shantae sat down to rest her back against the wall, gulping the stinky air greedily, her hands shaking. What sort of dungeon was this? _Where_ was it? At least, she have defeated its boss, it was just bad luck to warp right into its room. Yeah.

After catching her breath — she'd eat something to replenish her energy if not for the _reek_ — Shantae stood up reluctantly to explore the altar room. Because the switch to open the door _had_ to be there.

The sight wasn't any less grisly the second time around. The parts and pieces on the bloodied altar were arranged with macabre artistry. Some sort of magic diagram? Doing her best not to look, Shantae glanced around studying the walls. And here it was, to the right of the entrance, a big metallic skull in the roughly hewn stone wall. Pushing it resulted in its eye-sockets glowing softly with yellow light, a grinding noise reaching from the corridor.

Hurrying to leave the dreaded boss room, Shantae threw all caution to the wind. Passing quickly through the hall with the dead boss, she ducked under the slowly ascending slab to breathe in the fresh...

Wait.

The air here still stank, just differently. Carrion and lavatory, weaker but no less vile. Smothered by the coppery, overpowering smell of blood.

Caught by surprise, Shantae froze, stopping among dense brown foliage. Then she slowly, cautiously moved meaty brown leaves aside.

Dark crimson clouds flowing rapidly overhead, glimpses of pitch blacknes in their gaps. Steep hills and crags overgrown with uniformly-brown jungle, illuminated with unnatural light coming seemingly from nowhere, fading into dark red haze smothering the horizon. A ways down, tall brown grass and reeds growing out of still pools and channels of red liquid that just couldn't be water.

And silence. So oppressive and total it was ringing.

"Where the hell am I?" the half-Genie blurted. Then it hit her.

"Oh, hell..."

(シーンブレイク)

A.N.1: So here you have it, the first chapter of the thing that should never been. Also, if you just played Doom (2016) and wonder why monsters look and act wrong... Well, I use Brutal Doom canon. It's a great modernization mod for Doom II (1994) so of course many monsters look different and have different move sets: despite all upgrades it keeps faithful to the spirit of a game that is 22 years older. None of the heavy hitters is able to jump, for starters, while some monsters are just plain nastier, on the level of "kill it NOW or you're screwed!"

A.N. 2: how hard was the fight, game mechanics wise?

Shantae: 32 hp, dmg 8 (12 with Monster Milk buff) - 1..2 hits to kill (31percent probability to survive the first hit)

Hell Knight: 500 hp, dmg 10..80 (8..64 ranged) - 42..63 hits to kill, depending on how fast her buff wears out.

Ouch.

(シーンブレイク)

FYI: Hell on Earth Starter Pack is an unfinished alpha version of Extermination Day. It _does_ have the older version of the map where the action of this chapter happens, but it is barren, without the "Hell is Vietnam" vibe. I, personally, urge you **not** to play Hell on Earth because Extermination Day would eventually be released, despite all the delays. You don't want to begin with the inferior version of this epic megawad, believe me. I have the great honor of being among the closed beta testers.


	2. No Friendlies in Sight

**Too Nice for Such Brutality**  
by Cheb

Shantae was created by and belongs to Matt Bozon and WayForward. DooM II was created by id software and belongs to Bethesda. Brutal DooM mod is being created by Sergeant Mark IV

 **Chapter 2,  
No Friendlies in Sight**

Shantae was sneaking through the jungle trying to be very, very quiet. Any dense forest is dangerous because of its limited visibility, you never know what is lurking a few fathoms(1) ahead. Even the jungles of her home, the Sequin Land, hosted some impressive creatures, like giant spiders. This alien forest in an unknown Hell realm would be no exception.

 _(1)Here Sequin Land fathom is 172 centimeters (5ft 7.72in)_

The dead silence was really freaking her out, only broken by buzzing of rare flies. There were no bird calls. The brown foliage was unmoving, the warm air permeated with stench of blood utterly still. You could hear your own heartbeat on the background of tension singing thinly in your ears.

Should she move down to the lowland, to travel along the criss-crossing channels of blood? On one hand, she'd be hard to surprise down there. On the other hand, she'd be in plain sight for anything that lurked in the jungle, hidden by the dense shrubbery. So no, she tried keeping to the top of this vaguely defined ridge. Without knowing what sorts of monsters lived here, without a way to replenish her supplies she had to avoid detection at any—

A branch snapped under her foot, angry hiss sounding immediately from her right.

Her heart pounding, Shantae took a combat stance. A brown, spiky ape emerged pushing branches aside, eerily silent. It blended with its surroundings so well she'd miss it until it was too late, if not for its hiss.

"Um, hello?" Shantae tried. Its bloody-red eyes were conveying unthinking aggression, but you never know until you try.

The brown thing, a head taller and probably two times heavier than the girl, snarled as it leaped at her, its upraised hands bearing very large and dangerous looking claws, bone-white spikes bristling from its shoulders and extremities. She dodged, whipping it across its muscled chest twice. This one bled red. Snarling, it leaped again. She barely dodged in time, a bush getting in her way. Fighting this thing in this thicket was dangerous! Shantae began retreating rapidly. The spiky ape lit fire in its upraised hand, to lob a fireball at her a second later. She ducked, the projectile exploding against some bush to wash the bare skin of her back with a wave of heat. This one had ranged attacks too! Groaning, she went in close and personal, whipping and dodging frantically and even deflecting its slashes with her bracers.

This dangerous dance went for a while: unlike the monsters of her home land, who either were magical clones exploding into trash after a couple hits, or could get a hint and run away with a tail between their legs after a good whacking, this one fought stubbornly until she whipped it to death, its bloody corpse slumping to the ground. All in all, it took a dozen or so hits and too many near misses for her comfort. If all monsters here were so tough and so brutally single-minded, she was in trouble!

Shantae froze, listening. Have the racket attracted anything else? The silence told her otherwise, at first, but then there were sounds of something moving through the bushes. Something massive.

Playing it safe, the girl climbed the nearest palm tree to freeze right under its crown. Exposed like this, someone could see her from the distance. But she decided that watching out for sudden fireballs was better than facing a heavily stomping unknown on the ground.

What erupted from the dense foliage below resembled a huge gorilla. If one was pink, bald and possessed a ridiculously over-sized maw with fangs that belonged on a hippo. Oh, and it had small horns and its feet were bird-like, with three fingers and backward-facing knees.

The pink thing poked at the spiky ape's corpse in confusion, sniffed around for a bit, then returned to grab the corpse in its maw. Tearing an arm off with frightening ease, it just stood there chewing.

Nope, nope, no way. Shantae wasn't going to test how tough _this_ one was. Moving carefully around the trunk, she took aim then pushed off the tree with both legs, with a practiced motion pulling the pirate hat out of hammerspace to grab it with both hands. The pink gorilla grunted, agitating and scouring the bushes below. Thankfully, it failed to look up.

Holding the hat tightly, Shantae glided from the ridge down, over the slope and over the blood channel, to land on the opposite shore. Much closer to the channel now, because as good as the hat was, gliding it meant steadily losing your attitude.

She sat in silence for a long while until she was sure nothing else was chasing her. Then she began prowling again, cautious and nervous, afraid she'd only know of a spiky ape from its claws sinking into her back.

Half an hour later she was still sneaking through the jungle, having grown more or less accustomed to the silence. Nothing had jumped her so far, but on the other hand she found out she was on a small island surrounded by blood channels. There was nothing of use here. The question was: should she use the scimitar dash, making her more or less invulnerable and unable to sink however deep these channels were? But the move was very loud and flashy, it'd attract every monster around. Then again, what sort of things could live in the blood? Giant carnivorous leeches? Shantae shuddered scrunching her face in disgust.

Still, the desire to stay quiet won. The girl approached the shore with caution. The ground here was soft, squelching under her pirate boots, slimy like coagulated blood. Or _was_ it coagulated blood? Tense, she waded further, pushing reeds aside. Thankfully, the channel turned to be barely ankle-deep, its bottom muddy and slippery. She crossed it uneventfully, then sneaked deeper into the shrubbery. Was this another low island? How long would she have to sneak through this jungle with its deadly spiky apes? Wilderness _could_ stretch for hundreds of miles! The girl eyed crags framing the jungle. So high, you probably can see so far from their tops. Alas, she couldn't becoma a monkey anymore to—

Wait, were these voices?

Doubling her caution, Shantae sneaked closer to whoever was talking. Peeking trough leaves, crouching low, she could make out three men in sort of blood-caked army uniforms, carrying strange thin muskets. They were milling across a small glade of sorts, separated from the channel by dense but narrow wall of shrubbery. Were they watchmen sitting in ambush?

She watched them for a while, more and more sure they were Zombies, not Humans. The overall shambling movements, the deep, unattended neck wound on one, the lack of visible breathing... Strangely, they weren't green as proper Zombies should be, but whatever. More importantly, she couldn't tell if they were wild mindless ones or sapient ones like Rotty. On one hand, mindless Zombies do not use tools. On the other hand, they never spoke, only grunting occasionally.

Deciding it was safer to check now, when there were only three of them, and making sure her retreat route was clear, Shantae tried:

"Um, excuse me?"

The trio of "You will die!", "Mortal!" and an inarticulate growl were answer enough, all three muskets pointed in her general direction. Suddenly, her danger sense screamed at her to move! Unthinking, the girl launched herself from her hiding spot, the bushes there perforated a split second later by a hail of bullets. These weapons were roaring like gatlings, not muskets, flashing continuously! Panicking, Shantae ran out of cover, her boots splashing thick liquid. Her danger sense screamed again, she was practically feeling the aiming lines swinging around, searching for her. She dashed away along the shore, zig-zagging as her danger sense was prickling haphazardly with potential hits, bullets zipping by.

And if that wasn't enough, angry hisses sounded ahead just as she was about to hide behind a bend as the channel was making a right turn. Two spiky apes jumped at her, erupting from bushes on the opposite shore. Shantae still ran to the right, dodging one fireball. Then, more angry hisses from behind! Dreading what she'd see, the girl took a look over her shoulder only to see the two brown beasts stalking purposefully towards the Zombies, ignoring her. What had just happened?

Then it dawned on her: some bullets must have hit the apes! So, were they enemies of each other?

She had no time to ponder that, though, as rapid splashes alerted her to an incoming pink gorilla, this one's eyes solely on her. And it was so fast! Her frantic flight brought her back over the bend where the Zombies resumed shooting at her. The spiky apes were almost upon their hiding spot, lobbing fireballs. Getting an idea, Shantae executed a very risky maneuver, over-sized jaws snapping inches from her side, but she was now on the opposite side of the pink beast from the Zombies... It worked like a charm. A stray bullet hitting its meaty rump, it took offense and turned around, abandoning its pursuit of her.

The spiky apes were among the Zombies now, the bushes where they hid erupting with roars of pain, haphazard shooting and sounds of tearing. Deciding she didn't want to know, Shantae made a hasty retreat, turning left this time, away from the channel, to hide behind a cliff where terrain was growing high and rocky, with much less plants around, towards a towering crag.

Have they forgotten about her...? A sepulchral hiss made the girl jump whirling around... To see an opening in the cliff face, barred by columns whose faces were carved in the shape of rich blue skulls. There was a modest sized room beyond it, full of over-sized flying and flaming skulls. Shantae balked at that. She had seen many a weird cackler during her adventures, some of them with a candle on top of their skull, but these things were a bit too bizarre. Horned, too. They were just sort of milling around. One tried ramming her, its toothy maw opened wide, its eye sockets glowing like hot coals, only to bump into the columns barring the exit, spaced too close for the large thing to fit. It looked pretty dumb to her.

Her spelunking expertise told Shantae these columns were sort of a door, able to retract into the floor or the ceiling. Probably requiring a key of something like that. Also, there was an altar in the room, with a very obvious glowing yellow skull on top of it. Bring a key to get another key? Felt like usual dungeon trickery.

Just then the pink gorilla rounded the corner proving that no, it haven't forgotten about her. It was wounded but persistent. Luckily, one of the spiky apes followed close behind it, launching a fireball that naturally hit the pinkie's backside instead of its intended target. Roaring in pain, the beast turned around again.

Leaving the sounds of ferocious scuffle behind her, the purple-haired girl began climbing the crag foothills, grabbing at shrubbery. The slime-caked boots were slipping, losing purchase on the rock. Shrubs kept tearing out of the ground. She didn't want to fall back down. Thankfully, she managed to reach quickly found a rocky ledge with a sheer cliff below it, a waterfall of blood gurgling nearby. Was she good?

The pink thing was chewing, its mouth full, its muzzle crisscrossed with deep cuts. The bottom half of the spiky ape was lying nearby.

Shantae sat down with her feet dangling down the cliff and her elbows on her knees, to stare at the grisly scene. This may be a vital strategy of survival. Monsters back home never turned on each other.

Sigh.

This unfamiliar hell was so horrifically brutal. And now she had to explore it, learn its secrets and find the portal or warp platform that led back to the Oubilette of Suffering. Which now felt cozy and safe in comparison, its monsters almost cuddly compared to the local denizens.

The thought that there may be no such portal was discarded as unproductive. She had friends back home who waited her back, who depended on her!

The pink thing, having finished with its meal, was running back and forth below the cliff now, growling, looking at her hungrily and even jumping at times. Utterly pointless with good three fathoms separating them. It couldn't jump well, too. Well, knowing these were dumb was a relief.

Shantae pulled out the pirate pistol and began shooting the pink gorilla. The glowing magical bullets were making it flinch and roar in pain. Id didn't stop its pointless running back and forth, its feet splashing in the blood pond loudly, until it dropped dead, a dozen or so hits later. A dozen! Even as it began severely wounded and she had the pistol upgraded to the max. Were all monsters here strong like mini-bosses?

The confirmation came in the form of a stray flying flaming skull that came from somewhere to beeline for her with frightening speed. Dodging it proved almost insultingly easy, though, as the dumb thing could only fly in a straight line, bumping into the cliff face and hanging there, disoriented, for a few seconds. Some tedious hair whipping and pistol shooting later it crumbled to disappear in a burst of flame with a mournful screech. Definitely not something that dies easily, but not too dangerous — while it was alone.

That finished, Shantae took notice of a disturbing pattern. So far, neither the boss, nor the regular monsters had dropped anything remotely useful, like spell scrolls or items. She had to hoard her supplies carefully or find what items this... let's consider it an extended dungeon... could provide.

Finally free of distractions, she took notice of tall, sharp mountains dominating the horizon across the swamp, towering above even the crags, their flinty sides glinting through the blood-red haze. In fact, that was the direction the shroud of crimson and black clouds was flowing from.

So, this was mountainous land. Decision where to explore further was then a simple one. The blood swamp was gross, her pirate boots now caked in sticky, drying mess, the original purple color wasn't even visible . The jungle was nerve-wrackingly dangerous because the brown spiky apes blended into brown foliage too well.

On the other hand, the sky scraping crag behind her. The shrubs for grabbing were receding the higher it went, giving way to bare, sheer rock. But Shantae wasn't going to whine or cry for her lost transformations. She began climbing up, stubbornly and persistently, for as long as she could. From up there, she surveyed her surroundings, barely clinging to the cliff.

The jungle threaded with blood channels was really stretching as far as she could see. Which wasn't that far: the crags chaotically scattered around were obstacles to visibility, more crags and rock walls could be glimpsed further away through gaps between them. But more importantly, the crag she tried to climb happened to be just a protrusion of a rock wall. The next crag over as well, just a bit less steep. And there was a road winding along its side, a few faraway sparks of torches visible along it.

A civilization! Maybe even someone non-hostle for a change!

Her spirits lifting, Shantae pushed off the cliff with both her legs to glide on the hat towards the road. Hoping she wouldn't be attacked mid-air by some skull forcing her to land and continue towards the road on foot through the jungle. But her flight was uneventful. Soon she began her ascent, striding silently but briskly, watching her back. The uneven rocky slope had sort of a beaten path winding up, rough but wide. No cart could pass here, and some steps were too tall for a human, but there were traces of someone traveling here on foot. There should be something up worthy of her attention there on the top!

Hiding up here would be difficult, but that went for monsters as well, she was unlikely to be ambushed in close quarters. Her danger sense would warn her of anyone sniping her. And finally she could always use the scimitar dash to run back to the swamp and hide in the jungle. Or even fly away on the hat, like a bird. An overfed bird unable to climb, unlike the harpy she would never become again.

The vista opening as she climbed higher was nothing new. Jagged crags were still stretching into distance, only she could see them better now. Was it becoming brighter? At times the path was cutting into the mountainside with roughly cut terraces obviously hand made. The jungle below began fading into unnatural darkness smothering the ground like a shroud of black fog while the sky was definitely growing brighter, the black-and-crimson clouds gradually becoming shades of orange.

When Shantae reached the top, not having encountered a single monster, she found a huge castle of crimson stone towering ahead. The sharp tips of its multi tiered tower's pointy roofs were reaching for the sky, but she couldn't gleam any details because the road ended in a massive gate in a similarly crimson wall rising out of the uneven slopes.

And here went her hope for a peaceful civilization: the small guard towers framing the gate were manned by familiar spiky apes mingling with familiar non-green Zombies toting those deceptively thin tinkertech muskets. So these sorts _could_ get along? Go figure.

What to do next, though? Definitely not walking up to the gate and knocking. Shantae reviewed her options. Normally, she'd transform into a monkey, climb the sheer rock walls and be inside in minutes: the wall was broken in many places by rocky outcroppings . Not having her Genie magic was making things harder, but not impossible. Human body is much less suitable for climbing, but she still had memory of doing it as a monkey. Plus, the pirate hat guaranteed she'd land safely even if she slipped.

Deciding to give it a try, Shantae sneaked along treacherous rock ledges far to the left of the gate. The cliff was curving to the right, revealing a vista of a similar crag. This looked like a ravine in a rock wall, deep but far from not reaching the very base. But what else was this cliff hiding? Curiosity demanded to climb up and see!

Replacing the pirate boots in hammerspace to climb barefoot, the lithe girl began trying to imitate a monkey. Huh, this wasn't as hard as she'd thought. Finding purchase in small bumps and cracks was a second nature to her, the human body felt ungainly and overweight for the task, her fingers and toes were smarting as she strained them to grip at the rough stone, but... it was working! She just had to be careful when judging distances, how far up could she leap to grab at holds out of reach.

Why haven't she ever tried climbing in her birth form? Maybe because transforming into a monkey was so easy?

Some effort and two near slips later, Shantae cautiously peeked over the edge. Instead of a single castle, or a town, as she expected, there were several separate towers blocking sorts of gorges cutting through a serrated mesa. The castle was further ahead, still unreachable, surrounded by another wall with huge bonfires burning on top of its towers.

Deciding to scout the general layout first, she went left, along the edge of the mesa. This way she could just jump off the cliff to get out of sight fast and land safely on some ledge below.

The vista gradually opening to the left revealed a thin, tall tower in the distance, its roof so pointy it was like a needle aimed at the sky, perching on the very precipice of a sheer cliff. The rock wall was falling down sharply, after a couple ledges just disappearing in a shroud of darkness, the same as the one hiding the jungle. But further ahead, there was only emptiness, the clouds fading in the distance into orange haze that merged seamlessly with the darkness below instead of a proper horizon.

Shantae hurried forward, jumping from rock outcropping to rock outcropping or flitting over chasms on the hat. Then she froze taking the vista ahead: this was really the edge of the world. The rock wall was protruding into the emptiness in crags and cliffs., fading into the darkness below. And this edge was stretching to the left and to the right as far as she could see. Even the faraway mountains were ending there, their steep slopes disappearing into the same darkness.

And against this bottomless darkness a lone round tower loomed, its proportions titanic, the merlons of its embattled crown the size of buildings. It was growing of a rock protrusion, like a lone crag rising from the darkness a small distance away from the rest of the rock wall. The scale was dazzling. There was a central structure on its top, probably the size of Sultana's palace's central tower, with wide cylindrical roof and some huge spikes protruding out of it horizontally.

There was a thin black line of an obsidian bridge connecting the crimson castle with the tower, resting on two pillars above the mess of ridges and ravines.

The air of it, the aestetics, this lone tower standing proudly all but screamed: "here lives the boss". Shantae just decided it was the last place she'd visit if she had a choice when something moved. She rubbed at her eyes. No, they weren't deceiving her. A dull red shape taller than the high walls, more massive than the building-sized merlons, a literal mountain was walking there, circling the tower top unhurriedly.

Its shape humanoid, at least what was visible above the wall, from the waist up, its flat head bearing huge horns, its flesh all grotesquely bulging muscles, its forearms immense rectangular cannons.

 _That_ was the boss.

The brute she fought? It was but a mouse. That thing could have stepped on it without even noticing.

Gulping as her throat was suddenly bone-dry, Shantae crouched, moving away. Then she caught herself. She wasn't here to clear this, ahem, dungeon. She didn't have to fight the boss. Her goal was to watch, learn and find a way home. With as little fighting as possible.

Leaving the boss be, she climbed up the wall. The huge blocks of crimson stone had enough gaps between them that climbing it wasn't harder than climbing a wall of wild rock. Now she could peer into the yard of this huge castle! Pulling herself up, Shantae carefully leaned over the fence of iron spears crowning the wall. And only saw the uneven surface of the mesa top. Why make a wall if there's nothing beyond it? For the sake of looking good? To make the castle look bigger on the outside?

Shrugging, the girl sneaked across the open, rocky ground towards the drop into real castle yard further ahead. She felt unease under the scrutiny of those black pits of the central tower's windows. But there was finally the edge. She leaned cautiously... and saw a literal sea of pink. Meep. The spacious courtyard was packed with pink gorillas, just milling about, grunting and bumping into each other. So many!

Intimidated, Shantae was thinking of retreating to try in another place when she was suddenly enveloped in flames. Ack! Jumping to her feet, the girl sprinted away with inarticulate yells of terror. The flame was clinging to her, growing in intessity. Hot! Hot! Hot! It burns!

And then it was suddenly gone and she could breathe again.

Glancing over her shoulder, Shantae saw the flame just hang there in place, flickering before dying.

 _What_ was that? What had just happened? Did she trigger a trap? Was it an enemy attack? Was there a monster that could just set her on fire with a glance?

Shaken, she stopped at the cliff edge, trying to gather courage to investigate the fortress further. Then it was shot and buried when she saw a numerous flock of large red spheres rising from one of the lesser buildings. Slipping over the edge to hang with her hands, only the top of her head visible, Shantae watched this new kind of monsters warily. No legs, no wings, just bumpy red spheres with horns and wide, wide maws, almost splitting in half when they opened. Big enough to swallow her whole!

A single flaming skull mixed in the flock provided her with useful insight as it bumped one of the flying heads, which took offense. Its maw lit up to belch a powerful thunderball. Outclassed, the skull none the less tried ramming the red monstrosity again and again. The huge spheroid displayed unexpected agility, dodging swiftly to the side. It took a lot of haphazard shooting but only three hits to destroy the skull.

Notably, neither the ball bumping into its brethren nor its thunderballs hitting them fazed them. So, these were immune to their kind's attacks at least. Good to know, provoking infighting could be not as easy as it seemed at the first glance.

Circling a couple times lazily, the flock of maws descended out of sight. Shantae climbed back to the top to put the boots on and jog warily away, backtracking her steps. Investigating a fortress choke-full of monsters proved too dangerous, maybe she could find some safer options in the swamp?


	3. Struggling to Adapt

**Chapter 3,  
Struggling to Adapt**

Shantae actually glided part of the way down on the pirate hat, to better map out the lay of the land. But she haven't found anything of note. The first two thirds of her flight, the jungle below wasn't even visible in the darkness. When the brown shroud of forest faded into sight, her hands were already tiring. The road was winding to somewhere at her right, disappearing behind rock outcroppings and titanic crags. Iit seems the swamp was just the lowest part of such terrain where blood flowing down from the mesa was pooling.

Waitaminute, what was that thing running down the side of the crag towering above that small skull-cave? Right beside the red streak of a bloodfall?

The girl landed nimbly on a wide rock ledge a square shaft cut into the cliff face was disappearing into. Its wall had metallic rails. This looked like some sort of lift! She peered up. Perfectly smooth bands of iron were disappearing in a dark square hole cut into an overhang of the crags top. She peerred down into the square hole. darkness, but there was flickering torchlight at the ground level.

Gliding down to the base of the crag, the former half-Genie found a previously unnoticed tunnel leading to a platform. If she just had been paying attention earlier!

Shantae sighed in frustration, wincing at the returning stench of blood she had been glad to forget. Up above, there is probably yet another castle choke-full of monsters. She wanted something smaller and simpler to begin. A small cave, or a hut.

She trudged away. The flaming skulls still milling behind those blue pillars. She was actually growing hungry — and had nutritious lobster tails in her inventory to boot — the stench made thinking of food a nauseating affair. Instead, she went trudging along the nearest blood channel, having to step into it at times where bushes were too dense.

These channels were gross but provided a convenient getaway route for her trump, the scimitar dash.

So far, nothing had jumped the girl. She was even growing used to the eerie silence. Was there light ahead? She approached cautiously.

There, on a flat, rocky isthmus breaking the channel, were several lit candles surrounding a red magic circle framed by two bloody poles with series of mutilated and decayed heads stuck on hem like beads. Inside the circle, there was a mutilated corpse. She approached stepping lightly. This was a massively built man in green armor once, now his head and right shoulder were practically pulped.

Looting may be seen unethical, but any practiced relic hunter — like her — had well developed habits of grabbing anything that wasn't nailed down. A bit like kleptomania, to be honest, but all is fair in a dungeon.

A cloud of flies buzzing, maggots wrigging furiously, stench hanging so thick it made your stomach twist into a pretzel. Looting this mutilated corpse would be so gross. But Shantae had to learn what sorts of items and supplies worked here. The question was: was this a trap or not? Most likely it was, but she wasn't going to pass such an opportunity.

Tense, ready to bolt, the girl approached the body. Nothing was jumping at her. She stepped into the circle...

A nearby cliff face unraveled, like it had been an illusion, revealing two familiar looking goat-headed brutes. Twin roars of fury made her jump. They were shaking with rage, their muscles rippling, towering over her.

Squeaking in terror, Shantae fled blindly, the disgustingly lukewarm blood of the channel splashing all over her harem pants. She even forgot to scimitar-dash. A torrent of lethal green bolts missed her wide, blowing some innocent shrubbery to cinders.

Two of them! At once! These nigh-invulnerable hulks could be just garden variety monsters, not even mini-bosses! Anyway, there was no way she'd take on these two. She survived against one by sheer luck and perseverance, fighting it because she was cornered and had nowhere to go. Not a case this time!

Lost in thought, glancing back to watch out for deadly bolts of green fire, Shantae rounded a leftward bend to bump into something rubbery! Bounced back, she slid a bit, barely keeping balance enough not to fall into the revolting channel.

"Moaaahh?" a bassy voice grumbled, the wall of obese flesh in front of her beginning to turn.

Eyes wide, Shantae backed away. This... This monster was as tall as the brutes, but it was also as wide as it was tall! Two or three times more massive! Disgustingly fat too, its hide all in sagging folds, its stubby legs almost invisible under its hanging belly. And its forearms were replaced with large cannons. She began backing away faster, glancing back. She couldn't just run to the side and hide in the jungle because the channel here was passing through a natural arch in a rock formation. Trapped! The fat hulk finished turning and aimed its cannons at her at the same time as the two brutes rounded the corner. Stupid, stupid! How could she let her attention lapse like that!

"Rhanghemaaaah!"

Abandoning all thoughts, pulling out the scimitar, Shantae ran as fast as she could, gaining momentum to activate the dash, blurring around the brutes, trying hard to steer to the right.

None too soon as a literal inferno exploded behind her, billowing flames engulfing the brutes!

Crashing through dense bushes she'd be unable to breach otherwise, Shantae canceled the dash and began climbing up the slope, her feet slipping, grabbing at tree trunks for purchase. There was no such thing as too much caution after seeing that avalanche of fire!

Roaring in pain, the brutes went on the offensive. Shantae found it prudent to follow the fight by listening to it from over a ridge. There were roars of pain — the fat monster's voice quite distinct from that of the brutes — explosions, hiss and roar of fire, sounds of tearing. One of the brutes screeched in pain, followed by frantic splashing steps ending in a loud splash-hiss. More tearing, the fat one voicing its pain. Then a wet gurgle... and silence.

Shantae waited holding her breath.

There were splashing steps receding into distance, matching the gait of a brute. So, one of them survived while another fell. As did the fat flame thrower.

What a frightening experience.

Standing up Shantae paused for a minute, pondering how to proceed. The tropical-like shrubbery was dense, with scratchy rigid bushes, large plume-like meaty leaves and other plants in that vein. Sneaking _through_ all that would be tedious and fraught with meeting a spiky ape face-to face. Not to mention getting scratched all over, what with her outfit consisting mostly of bare skin and thin, almost see-through silk. Only the bikini zone was protected by denser fabric.

She eyed a nearby palm-like tree. Normally, going the upper route would be much too tiring. But she could cheat using the pirate hat.

And so it went. Climb a tree, watch carefully making sure no one noticed you, glide to the next tree much further away than she'd be able to jump on her own. Repeat.

It worked like a charm. She was covering ground quickly, keeping the blood swamp to her left. A couple times spiky apes got agitated, hearing her but never looking up. And one time she had to drop into shrubbery as she saw incoming bluish white light. It turned out to be a perfectly straight and spaced stream of incandescent thunderbolts that charred, then sheared, the tree trunk.

So... She counted on her fingers. Disregarding The Boss at that tower, this was the eighth kind of monster she encountered. Or was it? She never saw who fired that.

A long, tedious and scratchy sneaking through the bushes Shantae dared to go to the treetops again. That incident never repeated itself. To her right, the jungle was stretching out of sight, all the same mess of rocky outcroppings and hillocks on the background of towering crags. To her left, the swamp was stretching on, blood channels separating the same rocky outcroppings and and hillocks with a jagged wall of rock beyond.

She came upon a gorge cutting from the blood channels into a rock massif she just climbed. Cautious, she followed it: the rocks were nearly bare, no plants to hide behind. It made one zig-zag before opening into a large glade cut into the jungle, a stocky building of massive gray blocks framing its opposite side, with the familiar road going away to the right. Huh, so that's where it leads. Coulda saved a lot of effort by just walking down the road.

The glade wasn't empty: three zombies and three spiky apes were milling about. There was a large area corralled with low fence, an upraised wooden platform in its center and on the platform... Shantae gasped: they had a prisoner! There was a man in green armor, down on his knees, his hands tied behind his back to a bloody pole. His most distinguishing feature was a full helmet, one with a... curved glass pane in front of his eyes?

This was not the time to ponder on weirdness! She had to save him! Poles with decayed heads stuck on them decorating the area were a good hint of what fate awaited him otherwise.

Her eyes narrowed, Shantae began planning, playing different angles of attack in her mind. But... It wasn't working. She found herself hit by bullets due to many zombies' targeting lines criss-crossing. Or jumped by one spiky ape or other - she wasn't going to imagine further, thank you very much. Or scimitar-dashing into dense shrubbery, having successfully disposed of half the enemies only to be jumped by the remaining half while she was stuck. It was like a bad puzzle, there was a small rock outcropping breaking the straight line, preventing her from using the road to make a running start.

Frustrated, the pointy-eared girl chewed on her lip. There must be a way to save him! She just had to figure how. Making a racket to draw some of them away? That required _thorough_ checking around lest she attracts a herd of monsters from just a bit further away.

Would be a nice opportunity to train sneaking skills if that man's life was not depending on her!

She checked the road and the blood swamp around the gorge mouth first. The road seemed deserted but there were monsters in the swamp, hiding in bushes along the channels. Some spiky apes, some pink gorillas, two fat flame throwers stuck on a bump in the middle of the channel and a badly burned brute wandering around aimlessly. So drawing those captors here was a very bad idea. She'd be lucky if none of the monsters she saw — and didn't see — here came as reinforcements during her daring rescue.

Returning to the glade she was relieved to find the prisoner still unharmed — and alert, judging by his helmeted head turning around occasionally. It was time to check the jungle around the glade and the building. The intrepid girl soundlessly descended on the hat, hidden out of sight of the monsters by the very rock outcropping framing the road entrance... She then barely avoided impaling herself on a wooden stake sticking out of the ground!

Twisting her body to contort around the stake, she stumbled and fell. Only to freeze, the point of another stake inches from her face!

Forcing her breathing down, Shantae very carefully stood up. This entire stretch of jungle was one immense spike trap, stakes of all kinds sticking out of the ground and even bristling on racks tied to the bushes.

On the positive side, no monster could possibly hide here or pass through this obstacle. On the negative side, she had to reach that building somehow. Groaning, she began inching through the spiky maze. It may be impassable for the bulky monsters, but she was much more graceful. Not to mention flexible.

It only took her fifteen minutes or so and only cost her a torn pant leg. Then came climbing up the wall of rough stone blocks. Nothing motivates perfection like a spike trap below you!

Reaching the top, Shantae peeked over the edge. Nothing was there but a flat stone roof, this building was unsophisticated like a brick whose shape it was mimicking. There were no flying monsters in sight, good. Alas, the view ahead was obscured by a towering crag. Between the building and the crag, there was another open space, with the road continuing only to disappear into a large gate-like tunnel entrance barred by thick columns of iron. Hmm. So this place was kind of a guard house on a road connecting the two fortresses. She sneaked closer to the edge. Uh-oh, there were monsters down there! Two brutes and two... brains on mechanical legs? Shantae blinked. Robots, she could get, because tinkertech was ridiculous. But a gray brain-like creature with tiny, stubby arms sitting on a four-legged tinker platform making it look sorta like spider...?

If those came running, her daring rescue plan would smoothly turn into a suicide. Shantae groaned. It could not be. There had to— Wait. This building had an entrance, right? And that entrance was barred by a massive wooden door, right? And what was peculiar about that door? It was framed by panels of vibrant yellow color, quite distinct in this world of red and brown. So, that yellow skull behind that blue skull-grate...? It was a key for this building. And there must be a blue one somewhere too! Color-coding keys and doors... If she was a master of dumb monsters, she'd do that for sure!

She imagined herself commanding an army of Bolo clones and shuddered. No wai.

But more importantly it meant those brutes and tinker-spiders couldn't do a thing unless someone comes with the yellow skull-key!

Feeling a burst of optimism, she sneaked back to the other side to peer over the edge. The jungle on the other side of the building had spikes visible, so it was impassable as well. Which left her... back with a charade of how to deal with three zombies and three spiky apes, all at once. Fr-r-rustration. Unless... Yeah, that would be _risky_ but if that guy could fight — and he looked like a warrior — then sowing confusion, then untying him, then hoping it works in the end was the best plan.

Deciding to attack sneakily, like a pirate, Shantae glided the hat over the clearing to hover right above one of the zombies. Then she performed a practiced swap, the hat going back to hammerspace and out going the scimitar. Mounting it like a pogo-stick, she rammed the zombie's head from above. Something crunched and she bounced successfully, allowing her to ram a second zombie who happened to be nearby. This time, the scimitar sank into his head with a wet crunch making the girl shudder in revulsion, lose her balance and fall to the ground at the third zombie's feet. The hail of bullets he let fly passed harmlessly above her, making the spiky apes roar in pain. Perfect!

Running to the wooden platform, Shantae used the scimitar to hack at the man's restraints. It took him only a couple seconds to overcome the surprise of seeing her. Laughing victoriously, he pulled a... different musket out of his own hammerspace inventory to start blasting at the monsters. This thing was like a cannon. It shredded. There was so much blood... And chunks...

Two spiky apes came down quickly. The last zombie was at that moment running around on fire after it caught the ire of all three of the apes. Moaning, flailing and stinking horribly like burnt meat.

Then, things went pear-shaped. A pink gorilla came running from the gorge. Two flying skulls rose from the jungle. How have she missed all of those!

The guy in green armor focused on the pink gorilla, shooting it once, twice... It wasn't enough. The wounded beast crashed through the fence just as the guy's weapon went click and stopped firing. He began reloading it frantically, feeding something small and red into it, dropping some of these things in his haste.

Shantae intervened, pulling out the pirate pistol and shooting the spiky ape and the skulls then running away. They followed readily, fireballs and huge flaming skulls zipping past her as she dodged. Another shot thundered behind her, then again. Then something hit all the monsters chasing her all at once. Wait, was that hand-cannon of his firing grapeshot?

The monsters turned and attacked the guy in green. All the three remaining: the pink gorilla's body was down at his feet. He sundered the first skull, then his weapon went click again allowing the second skull to ram him at full speed. Ouch, that must have hurt! He fed his weapon yet another red thingy and blasted the skull, having turned around as it sort of slipped around him after it hit.

Ignoring Shantae's terrified "Watch out!" he began reloading again, only to catch a fireball with his face as he was turning back to the last spiky ape. That didn't kill him.

But the following two fireballs did.

His entire upper torso went up in flames. Screaming in pain, he dropped his musket to writhe on the ground.

Yelling in anger, Shantae pulled out the scimitar and ran towards the beast, activating the dash as soon as she had enough speed. As she rammed it, it exploded into a bloody mess, practically splashing apart around her, the forces of magic pushing it all away so not a single drop landed on her.

That was... much, much gorier than any such collision back in Sequin Land where ramming monsters was simply sending them flying. But this was not the time for reflection! She hurried to the wounded warrior.

He wasn't breathing. His helmet was a warped, blackened mess fused to his neck armor thingy, there was no way to make him drink a healing potion. His face visible through the melted, cracked glass... She really, really wished she haven't looked.

Sighing in defeat, her mood plummeting, Shantae sat down on the platform edge. The first non-hostile human... Was he, really, human? And was he really non-hostile? She didn't have a chance to talk to him, and now he was dead and she was all alone again.

Not that being the lone hero in a hostile territory ever bothered her. It was more lack of purpose for wandering this place that got to her. And not knowing if— _how_ to return. Sigh.

She picked the discarded weapon. Lifting it up, she found it awkward. The weight wasn't bothering her: Shantae was stronger than she looked. But she was a petite girl and this thing felt oversized. Now, where had he been getting these... charges? Probably from his inventory, now lost.

And this was the wrong place to sit down figuring things out! Scouring around the platform, Shantae found many small red cylinders. Some empty, smelling funny, two heavier, sealed. Stuffing them and the weapon in hammerspace, she quickly looted the two unburnt zombies. The polite term was implying they "dropped" the items, even about monsters that possessed no hammerspace inventory.

One pistol, two tinkertech muskets and several little flat thingies that looked like ammunition later, the agile girl was climbing up the nearest cliff. None too soon as she saw that burned bruiser wandering through the gorge right after she flipped herself onto the cliff top.

So, what next? Shantae considered her options. She haven't seen any items of value, but these were probably hidden deep inside buildings and fortresses, just like valuable stuff back home was tucked away in dungeons. The problem was, she felt so ridiculously underpowered she had to retreat every time she met any monsters. Sneaking worked, to a degree, and she had good mobility advantage over the non-flying ones, and she had her trumps of the scimitar dash and the stealthy wrath-from-above hat-scimitar combo. But she'd lose these advantages as soon as she entered a confined dungeon, which she'd have to do. Eventually. Recalling the whole courtyard packed with pink gorillas she shivered imagining them stampeding her all at once, flooding narrow corridors.

There was also the problem of failing to spot monsters hiding out of sight, this was the easiest way to get herself killed. Poor guy.

So, her aversion to such grisly methods notwithstanding, she'd have to study the weapons she got. She'd prefer not to make her enemies explode into bloody chunks, thank you very much, but she needed an edge desperately.

Now, where should she do that? She pulled one tinker musket out. These weapons looked complex, she'd probably fumble a bit and make a lot of noise before she figured how they worked. Simply stay up here, on top of the rocks? She recalled that flock of red spherical things. And the two skulls that emerged so suddenly. And the one skull that had attacked her out of nowhere. No, bad idea. She'd concentrate on the mystery weapons leaving herself wide open and blam. No, she needed someplace safe, somewhere she'd preferably be able to bar entrance... Hmm... Wait, the room she had been warped to! As revolting as it was, the door could probably be closed again.

Right!

Deciding to check around first, Shantae glided from the rock formation down to the middle of the blood swamp, landing at channel edge with a squelch of muddy ground. Yeech. No one tried shooting at her, though, which was good.

The swamp was stretching on, further to the right of her, but she was going to return to the starting room now, along its other side. Maybe there would be some loot lying around for picking, or another prisoner who wouldn't die when she saved them?

After some cautious walk she noticed a wide channel running through a huge arch in a tall rock formation, curving to the right. Tht towering rock wall seemed to recede here, forming a hidden valley.

"Let's say south is the direction I took the first look in, when I just came outside." Shantae mumbled under her breath slogging down the channel, which was growing deeper. "Then the starting room, those tall mountains and the second fortress would be to the north of the swamp and the first fortress with the boss tower further to the south, and the edge of that vast emptiness runs roughly east to west." She slowed to a crawl, not wanting to get bootfuls of blood. "While I am now sort of on the southern side of the swamp. Hmm, it seems there's an opening ahead... Whoa, a whole lake of blood? Sheesh, they even got a pier with a dory tied to it. I'd better go the upper way, who knows how deep this lake gets and I got no desire go take a swim in blood."

The channel had, indeed, opened into a small lake as soon as it was out of the natural stone arch. The lake was surrounded by jungle, a wooden house standing at the far shore. No monsters were visible from here. This looked promising!

Shantae retreated into the swamp proper, then climbed the rock formation barefoot, the blood-soaked boots tucked away in hammerspace. Crossing the ragged massif uneventfully, she lied down on its edge, waiting and watching.

Nothing was happening, no one was moving. The hut was your typical jungle hut, with rough wooden walls, many wide windows and a flat thatched roof. A faint light was coming out of one of the windows on the near side. So gliding to the roof was out, it'd crunch loudly underfoot.

Eventually she glided to a small crag jutting close to the hut. Grabbing at a sheer rock wall was tricky but she made it and climbed to the top. Then she put the boots on and glided to the corner of the house, stopping there and descending naturally, without making a sound.

Then it was sneaking under the windows time! First, the window where the light was coming from. Huh, a golden chandelier? How incongruous. There were some armor pieces on a shelf but, more importantly, a lone zombie in a darker, almost black outfit toting a musket exactly the same as the one she inherited from the deceased guy. Ice-cold goosebumps crawling along her back, Shantae very, very carefully sneaked away. She had no desire to being exploded into bloody chunks, thank you very much.

That fright aside — the zombie wasn't looking alert so she would probably be fine — she went peeking into other windows. An empty room beyond the first one, then the front entrance... Oh. How disgusting.

There was a green marble pillar with a bloody, beating heart on top of it. Placed in the center of what could only be described as a rug of living flesh, pink and ridgy and stretched all over the floor.

Shantae hurried past. Nope, not poking that one.

The second window. Aha! There was a row of small white boxes with an unfamiliar symbol: a symmetric white cross in a green circle. Six of them in total. She hopped onto the windowsill to sneak inside, her steps light like a feather. The boxes were in her inventory faster than you can say "relic hunter". Score! Whatever they were.

There was also a metal barrel full of glowy green liquid. Fascinating, but better not touch without more insight. She was here only to grab everything that wasn't nailed down. In the back of the room there was sort of windowless closet. Acutely aware of blood smears leading from it, she peeked inside. A vibrant blue skull stared back at her, glowing prettily on a shelf on the far side of this small room. She was so glad she didn't need it, because lots of... raw meat, literal raw meat piled on the floor in front of it were a big fat hint that grabbing it was... fraught with peril.

There was nothing else here. Shantae peeked into the central room. The zombie was nowhere in sight, everything was quiet. But there was an entrance to another room in the back of the house. Inching along the wall to keep as far away from the rug of flesh as possible, she slipped into that room. Oh yeah! Propped on a stand next to the right wall, there was some sort of tinkertech cannon, big and black, all dull shine and fiddly techy bits. Stacked on the floor were wooden boxes, some of them opened revealing kinda-drum-like things inside, each with six elongated... somethings. Considering one such drum-thing was sticking out of the cannon? Ammunition!

Giddy with success, Shantae pushed it all into her inventory in record time, throwing out flesh pops and meat chunklets when it wouldn't fit. Maybe throwing food out was foolish, but these weren't very edible to begin with.

And now was the time to make herself scarce and go study the loot! Grinning like a loon, Shantae climbed out of the back window, onto a narrow open space around the hut that was devoid of shrubbery. There was no one aro— Her danger sense blared! Twirling to the right she saw a brute of a zombie in dark red armor standing in shadows next to the wall, toting a sleek shiny gatling. This six-barrel thing was many times thinner than the ones she saw back home, but knowing what devastation could a single _musket_ wreak...

And it was being pointed at her, beginning to spin.

Shrieking in terror, Shantae assaulted him, whipping frantically. He flinched, stumbled, his weapon wavering. Then he just weathered her next two hits unflinchingly and her world exploded in excruciating pain tearing at her insides! It quickly gave way to terrifying numbness. The black and red sky swayed, why was it right in front of her. Her vision swam, filling with black spots, fading away.

Then, a green flash, a sound not unlike running water, and she was standing in the familiar room carved out of bedrock, the long forgotten dead brute at her feet.

Grabbing at her abdomen, her eyes wide, the dancer girl found herself whole again, healthy and clean. But also barefoot. The pirate boots were gone.

Checking her inventory, she found she now had four Auto-Potions instead of five. The boots weren't there either, she now only had the hat, the pistol and the scimitar. And all the loot she paid so dearly for.

"It seems I can either get _much_ better at spotting hiding monsters, or keep dying horribly..." Wow, her own voice was so small and trembling. "Four more times..."

Dying turned out to be terrifying. And very, very painful. But still, she was already thinking what moves out of her martial arts repertoire she should have used to beat that gatling zombie. Grappling had to be the key!

Because pessimism was, frankly, just stupid.

(シーンブレイク)

 _A.N. For those who haven't played Brutal Doom: that was not Doomguy but rather one of those NPC companions who replace invisibility spheres on the classic maps. Believe me, these guys_ _ **never**_ _dodge. If you want them to live any longer than "tragically short", keep leaving them behind convenient corners (their follow/stand mode is switched by the Use button when you are close) and lure monsters into these makeshift killing fields._

(シーンブレイク)


	4. Enter the Hero

**Chapter 4,  
Enter the Hero**

Apprehensive of entombing herself for all eternity if the door jams after closing, Shantae none the less went into the... sacrificial...? slaughtering...? the room with mutilated corpses and a bloody altar. There, she pushed at the metallic skull. There was a deep click, the light in its eye-sockets died and the door began unhurried descent, cutting her from the outside world.

Only then did she think to check for hidden traps and doors. Because being in an enclosed space with so many dead bodies was creepy! It felt like something would jump out of the darkness any minute. She checked everywhere, including behind the altar, but the walls were solid.

Sitting under the lone torch in the hall, Shantae pulled the loot out. First, the white boxes with green emblem. Opening one revealed... Lots of little things most of which she couldn't even identify. There was a small roll of gauze, tiny vials of transparent liquids and boxes of pills. So, this was a doctor's kit. She tried reading labels but found they were written in the Old World Tongue. Groan. Lots of medicine, and she could only use the bandages. Well, at least until she meets someone who could read this stuff.

Next was the pistol. Small, sleek and having too many parts to make heads or tails out of it. At least the trigger part was obvious. She fiddled with it for a while, always holding it carefully pointed away from herself. The top part around the back could kind of slide back. There was a long, thin box hidden inside the handle. Its top part could be pushed in, feeling springy. Other than that, the pistol wouldn't fire. She learned how to make it click, after sliding the top part back and turning a tiny lever on the side into correct position.

So, it was out of charges. Shrugging, Shantae set it aside. She had a perfectly working pirate pistol with infinite magic ammo.

Next were the tinker muskets. The two thin ones were... weird, but not really more complex than the pistol. She decided to begin with ammo, four small flat metal boxes looted from... ahem... _dropped by_ zombies, the same as ones sticking out of the muskets in the bottom, forward of the trigger guard. These appeared sealed at first, but further inspection revealed their top side could be flipped open in pushed just so. Inside it were... brass charges? Sort of a pointy bullet attached to a brass cylinder that contained black powder. Probably. This was her first time holding a weapon that fired real non-magical bullets.

More could be glimpsed underneath the top one them. After some fiddling Shantae managed to pull one out, it had to be pushed in certain way to come loose. The next one was pushed in its place as if by a spring. Ingenious! But now she had one charge less. Her tongue stuck out in concentration, Shantae kept trying until she managed to push the charge back into the box. Hmm... But how many does it hold...? There was only one way to know. Sigh. She began pushing the charges out. After the thirtieth one the box showed its spring-pushed bottom. So each box held thirty in total. Next came the tedious work of putting them all back in.

All right, with four boxes it was one hundred and... Wait. Could she really trust unfamiliar semi-feral zombies to keep their gear in perfect order?

Groaning loudly in frustration, the girl sitting cross-legged began a long, boring task of pushing all the charges out of all the boxes, then pushing them back in.

..Someone, jump me now..

Argh. There were indeed 120 charges in four perfectly full boxes. Plus however many in the boxes still attached... Shantae let out a defeated sigh. She had to count those too, hadn't she?

Pulling the box out of the musket wasn't hard if you knew where to push before you pull. She knew now. Next, did this one have any sliding parts? She pulled and pushed and nudged until the top of the musket suddenly came loose leaving her with a cover of sorts in her hand, staring at the complex innards of pistons and springs and fiddly thingies... Ugh. She spent considerable effort finding how to put the cover back. Sooo... There was a knob on the left side, framed by a long thin slit. Pulling it back resulted in a charge falling out of the musket. When released, the knob sprang forward. Oh, _this_ was the counterpart of pistol's pully butt. Fiddling some more, she determined this was exactly what allowed the weapon go click when she pulled the trigger. When a small lever on the side was in one of its tree top positions, not its bottom-most one. Next came inserting the little box of ammo. Huh, this was the simplest part. Then pulling the trigger - just to check the hunch. No boom. Right, so pulling the sliding part either makes these weapons ready a charge or makes them spit one if it was already there. She did just that. Now—

Her danger sense prickled making the girl yelp and jump onto her feet dropping the musket. What...?

There was still the same silent hall around, ill lit and permeated with revolting stench of decaying flesh. The dead brute, still as ever. So what could... Oh! She slapped her face. Of course bullets could bounce off stone, she was in a small danger of hitting herself. So, she had to open the door and bring her shooting experiments outside. Which may attract spiky apes while she'd be distracted. Or... She eyed the dead brute speculatively. What a bad thing to do, but... She concentrated making herself think of it as ham. A large ham.

Pistols were easy and familiar. Just point, squeeze one eye shut to aim better and shoot. Exactly like her fire magic, while she still had it, using her index finger to shoot fire. But muskets were two-handed weapons. Shantae tried holding it differently to see which way would be more comfortable. The weapon was big and unwieldy either way, but she found it best holding the under-handle in front with her right hand while the butt rested in the crook of her left elbow, her left index finger on the trigger. Directing the musket at the... ham, she pulled the trigger. BANG! Owie, her ears rang. Also, a small shiny something had zipped in front of her. She bent down to pick up a brass cylinder that had been formerly attached to the bullet. Ouch, hot!

Soooo... Shantae contemplated while sucking on her finger. She should probably switch hands. Otherwise - she just knew it - one of these hot rejects would eventually find a way into her top.

With her left hand on the handle under the barrel and her right hand on the trigger it felt... More proper. Shooting again and again she explored the effects of the small lever. The bottom position, the trigger won't even move. The second position. Firing one shot each time she pulled the trigger. The third position. Firing _two_ shots when she pulled the trigger. In a very quick succession. Then, the final position should be the gatling mode! She tried it. The gun roared struggling in her hands, and then it was out of bullets. Gosh, that was fast!

So, she thought pulling the ammo box out of the second, identical musket. How much were 120? Oh, with eleven from this one it was 131 in total. Not much, probably. The spiky apes were hit and then fought and still one was left standing, with two of them against three zombies — by the way, shouldn't she visit there and collect their ammo? — and the pink gorilla was hit at least twice but had still defeated that last spiky ape and took a dozen shots from the pirate pistol. So, let's say, one ammo box for one pink gorilla. Making her limit just a few of these beasts in total. Reassuring in case of a random encounter, but assaulting some place similar to that courtyard? No way.

Deciding to leave one musket out as her subspace pocket was finite, Shantae pulled the next weapon out. The grapeshooter the deceased green guy used. This one was black color with dull shine, the outer shell around the barrel full of small round holes, the butt dark red wood. All in all it looked simpler, more robust. A fitting dangerous look for a powerful weapon that makes people explode.

It turned out this one's pully part was the handle under the barrel. The red charges had to be fed manually into the bottom. Having only four, she didn't risk firing it.

Next, the cannon. Now, this one was big. And bulky. And heavy. Being five times stronger than any untrained girl of her build, this was the first time Shantae felt the weight.

...aaand it had holes at both sides, which left her stumped until she just looked at the trigger to tell which end was the front. Still, why a second muzzle in the back? Pulling the ammo drum out after some effort, she looked through the barrel at the torch. Yep, it was see-through, a smooth round pipe.

A mystery. One that could get her killed if she figured the weapon's function wrong. Leaving the ammo drum aside for now — it had four charges left — she examined the cannon. There were two handles, both close to the front. One was just a handle, sticking at an angle to the left, opposite the ammo drum, the other was at the bottom, the trigger built into it, a bit further back than the first one. Now how would... Aha. With her left hand on the forward handle and her right hand on the trigger handle, her arm around it and the weapon resting on her forearm. She twisted her head to look back. Yes, it was sticking past her elbow. She was pretty sure it was how it should be held. It felt over-sized and heavy, even without the ammo drum.

Fiddling with it some more revealed a tiny lever that made a protrusion on the left lit with green light. Looking into it, Shantae found it was kind of looking glass, making the opposite wall appear closer and much better lit. It had sort of criss-crossing lines, mightily convenient. But how was she supposed to be looking into it...

Figuring the weapon could be also held on her shoulder was a no-brainer after that. But there was something gnawing at her. Shouldn't a cannon this big have a huge kick? Wasn't that why they always put cannons on these heavy wooden things?

Wracking her brain for a solution, Shantae tentatively put the ammo drum back in. The answer was on the tip of her tongue, something Uncle Mimic told her about forces and counterforces... Hmm... Non-magical cannons worked by blackpowder exploding and pushing the cannonball forward, right? And the kick was because of the, howzit, conversation law stating that the same explosion had to push the cannon back. So, if you removed the back of the cannon, the explosion just could come out freely and there is no kick?

It looked very much like it, leaving her puzzled why wasn't everyone using see-through cannons with two holes. Must remember to ask the Uncle when she comes back.

On the practical side, she had to watch what was behind her, lest the unleashed explosion bounces off a wall or something to kick her in her derriere.

Retreating into the corridor and angling to the side a bit so that cannonball hits a wall if it bounces, she tried firing the cannon. Then she found that tiny lever that kept these weapons locked and tried again.

Click.

She had to rotate the drum making sure a charge was actually inside before her experimenting succeeded. The cannon barked, with nearly no kick just as predicted, but the boom was earth-shakingly deafening as explosion bloomed on the stone door. Shantae's ears were left ringing.

Such terrible power! Whatever things this weapon was firing, these were definitely _not_ cannonballs. Any closer and she'd be hurt by the explosion. Not a safe weapon to use, not by a long shot, but this may be what would let her explore the local dungeons. She couldn't imagine a spiky ape, or even a pink gorilla, surviving such a blast.

Pulling all the crates out of her subspace pocket, Shantae carefully opened them — which required the scimitar to pry the covers — to swap the half-empty drum with a full one before putting everything back in hammerspace. She had five full drums, which made for 33 blasts in total.

Oh yeah!

Well, it was time to head out, wasn't it?

She practiced for a while, growing accustomed to three new weapons in addition to the pirate gear, swapping them back and forth. Then she donned her habitual pointy red shoes and went to the altar room — the bloody mess there still making her uneasy — to push the skull button and head out...

Wait.

What if she died again — a real possibility — and was brought back here, only for there to be a couple brutes investigating their friend's lair?

She shuddered imagining herself being torn apart by the angry beasts, then returning to life in a green flash, only to be killed again, and again, until auto-potions run out.

No, no, no. This spot was too important. Losing the ability to return here at will would be a small price for having a peace of mind. Waiting until the door finished ascending, Shantae pushed the button again, then ducked under the descending door on her way out. Here. Now it could only be opened from the inside.

The door thudded down with finality. Shantae jogged down the slope with her usual confidence, ready to pull out the grapeshooter or the scimitar. Yes, she couldn't use the dash anymore, but she still could jump high and land on their heads point first. Yes, getting away would be harder without the boots. But she was still very good at running, she managed without the boots all these years.

Moving deliberately towards the crag with the lift platform, she chose to go along the blood channels. She regretted that decision the first time she had to step in, without the boots. There was no helping it, the shrubbery was just too dense. Pulling her shoes into hammerspace, she stepped into the channel barefoot. "Yeech!" She shuddered in revulsion as the slimy bottom filtered between her toes, lukewarm blood lapping at her ankles. Still she pressed on, the disgusting mess squelching underfoot.

Nobody confronted her, there were no new monsters around. Coming to the three zombies' ambush spot she found a horrible sight, their bodies were savaged. The spiky ape had the top of its head blown off. Holding her bile in, Shantae looted the corpses. She only found two ammo boxes partially full, others were either emptied or caked in blood.

Flamings skulls were still milling about behind the blue grate, the body of the pink gorilla in the blood pond untouched. She jogged on, heading into the dark tunnel, soon to step onto a square wooden platform framed by bronze torches.

Contrary to her expectations, nothing untoward happened. The platform began unhurried ascent accompanied with faint scraping sounds. Soon it was out of the familiar hole in the rock ledge, the stone framing the shaft fading away until it turned into just one a flat surface, giving great view in three directions. The stench receded, sulfuric wind picking speed, sky returning to orange as she left the shroud of darkness, the jungle below disappearing from sight.

Eventually the platform went into that hole in the overhang, her surroundings growing dark as Shantae was suddenly apprehensive of unavoidable ambush. But nothing happened. The platform clanked to a halt, the rock wall between the rails replaced by a short tunnel. Walking out, the purple-haired dancer found herself on a jutting peak connected by a bridge to a small castle of dark crimson stone.

The space was partly flooded with slowly flowing blood, framed by a jutting rock wall. There was a flat stone ring resting on raised columns, decorated with mutilated corpses and parts thereof. Gah, the stench!

Avoiding these decorations carefully, because they were dripping writhing maggots, Shantae happened to step into the blood... Which turned to be warm, almost hot. Well, this place was anything but natural.

The big castle was in clear view from the bridge, towering to the left, the bonfires on its wall burning brightly. There was a ruined bridge running across the ravine separating the crag it stood on, its middle part nothing but a pile of rubble far, far below. Good, that meant no monsters were coming that way.

The small castle in front of her - its wall barely half a dozen fathoms high - sported a sturdy looking door with a decoration above it, sort of an uneven cross with its top hand twice as long. Also, there was a window in a sunken depression to the left! A chance!

Shantae hurried to the window, crossing the bridge quickly, to peer inside. Only to recoil in surprise: there were too many spiky apes for such a small room. And two or three red spheres who up close resembled giant carnivorous raspberries with a single cyclopic eye, more than a fathom wide, their bottoms festooned with growths that looked like dangling red guts.

As she watched, two brutes entered the room. And not the ones she was used to seeing. These two had dark red hides with sort of leathery shine. She wasn't sure what the different color meant, except she didn't want to learn right now. Those brutes looked even more intimidating. The monsters in the room must have shared that thought because they were giving a wide berth to the two - who headed straight for the door leading to the bridge. Oh no!

Jumping away from the window, Shantae climbed the wall in a hurry, barely managing to reach the top and hide herself on the flat roof before the door rattled open. Well, she wasn't going inside this way. Who could have thought that even such a small castle could hold so many monsters? And this was only the first room. What if there were even more of them further inside?

Going for easy pickings, like a vulture, seemed the most sensible course of action.

This mesa had a relatively flat top, cut through with pits and gorges, many seemingly framed by castle walls. Whoever built this, decided that drilling tunnels and closing natural gaps with fortifications was the way, letting roofs be level with the wild rock, which was interspersed haphazardly with flat stone covered with some prickly black substance, the portion she was standing on top was a convoluted shape of right angles hugging jagged cliffs, like a red crown resting on the broken rock formations.

There was no cover from flying ones, a risk, but she could always jump off the edge and drop into the swamp below. Keeping that in mind, Shantae followed the a broken end of the mesa, sheer cliff jutting out as peninsulas and falling apart into lone jutting bluffs. She was still barefoot, but the rocky ground wasn't bothering her: her shoes had quite thin soles, only to protect against scraping, really. So her feet were hardy after years of running through all sorts of wilderness.

After a while, blood congealing between her toes and gluing them together felt supremely icky so she took a moment to pick it out. Well, most of it. And now her finger was messy too.

Glancing around Shantae took notice of an outline of yet another fortress up on the cliff tops, far in the distance beyond the swamp. While she was peering at it, something glinted brightly down below. Leaning over the edge revealed a shiny blue sphere on a rock ledge not far below. There was sort of face floating inside. Finally, her first item!

There was a problem presented by a spiky ape lazing on the same ledge as the precious find, but the dancer girl solved that by jumping down fearlessly to engage it. Stunned by a sudden hair whip to the face, the brown beast failed to react when she performed a forward power kick. The hapless thing was launched well over the edge, disappearing from sight with a growl that sounded like it was pouting.

No monster stands between a relic hunter and her find, yeah!

Shantae approached cautiously. There was a large barred window in the rock wall next to the artifact. Peeking into it revealed a corridor going away into distance, choke-full of pink gorillas. Glad she had decided not to go inside — because this corridor had a t-junction branching towards that room at the bridge — she investigated the artifact. Her relic hunter expertise told her this item was magical, likely triggered by touching it. So she didn't, just put it in her inventory without making contact. Score!

After that, she climbed back to the top and continued on her way. Very soon the cliff receded sharply to the left, barring her passage with a modest-sized castle yard, the red wall plugging a deep ravine, protruding in a semi-circle, the massive merlons of its battlement twice her height. The yard itself was a mess of ruined cobblestones and pools of blood, looking like it was eroded by the flowing red liquid, some of it streaming out through wide cracks in the crenels.

There was nobody there, all was silent except some faint sounds like distant crackling — where were those coming from? The left side of the yard was a red castle wall with two small arched openings at its bottom, the sides framed with the everpresent brown of natural rock. The only other feature, beside a couple dried up trees, was a massive door in the rock wall she was leaning over, probably connecting to that monster-choked corridor. Thanks, but no thanks.

Jumping across the flat-topped merlons to the other side would have been a child's play, but Shantae followed the edge to the left instead, wild rock soon replaced by castle roof. To the left of her there was a ragged gorge going away towards the big castle - which was still towering above, a constant ominous presence. Moving ahead she found yet another yard, this one more like a cracked rocky cauldron with a blood lake on the bottom, overflowing into the abyss outside. There were red stone bridges arching through it, and rock ledges along its sides, but Shantae was already pulling back: there were at least half dozen of those red balls nesting in the blood below with their eyes closed, two unfamiliar huge cacklers wearing shiny breastplate walking around and too many spiky apes to count.

Tiptoeing around this deadly depression brought her closer to the gorge, its far end opening onto that broken bridge she had seen earlier. The bottom of this gorge was pockmarked with craters bubbling with red-hot lava, flames dancing above. There were lots of zombies and spiky apes on terraces where the gorge widened in front of the gate she stood above. The brown beasts were emitting chittering sounds. Good to know, this may help identify them out of sight. And on the bottom of the gorge there were a few brutes hiding behind jutting rocks.

It was almost like they set an ambush, expecting someone to come! But where from, if the bridge leading to the big castle was broken?

Shrugging, Shantae continued to the right, the mesa here nothing more than a narrow isthmus between the dark abyss of the jungle and the vast emptiness to the left. Still, there were gorges and small castles built to plug them, just like that first one. Should she try entering one? Shantae thought of approaching a castle on the ground level, along the bottom of one of these gorges. But what if there was a horde of monsters waiting just inside?

She imagined herself fleeing down a gorge under a barrage of deadly fireballs, only to meet a dead end. Or trying to climb out of a gorge under similar barrage. Brrr. So, correct approach would be finding an entrance into one of the castles from above, where it merges with the tops of the broken rocks. And that entrance had to allow for expeditious retreat.

Shantae sneaked deeper into the broken terrain, the pirate hat proving invaluable as it let her cross any gorges wherever she wanted.

Here, yet another castle, built of the same deep crimson stone in huge blocks. Its great gate down below wasn't even guarded. The problem was, it had no openings. It was one solid, massive tower. She circled it, climbing and gliding between rock tops. Just when she was ready to move on, she spotted a tiny courtyard cut into the rocky top of the mesa. A square pit, really, but with a door leading into the castle. It was probably an entrance for flying monsters. But more importantly, its uneven wall to the right of the door had several protrusions she was sure she could use to get out in three jumps. All the while concealed from anyone inside the castle.

This was a perfect spot! She made to jump down but froze, sudden apprehension overcoming her. Come on, the girl told herself, it's just an empty yard.

Right?

Feeling foolish, she called: "Hello? Anybody down there?"

Something replied, animalistic growls and snorts sounded from the empty yard startling her. As if she alerted a pack of... somethings. Shantae squinted in suspicion. In fact, all that snorting was suspiciously similar to the sounds the pink gorillas make. Pulling out the cannon, she fired down into the yard...

...and the seemingly empty air exploded with body parts and other viscera. One pink gorilla was brought to partial visibility, standing there with its arm torn off and roaring in pain, transparent like a pink shadow. Then it bled out and collapsed, gaining full visibility and... dropping a peculiar sphere that looked like a cross of crystal ball and an eye with a blue pupil floating inside on a red background.

She was unsure how to feel about this development. On one hand, finally! They _do_ drop items! On the other hand, invisible pink gorillas. As in, totally invisible. The stuff of nightmares, she won't feel safe ever.

Shooting the corners with the pirate pistol proved she had got them all, so Shantae jumped down into the yard, to tiptoe between the remains trying not to step into gore. She quickly whisked the eye-like sphere into her inventory. Ugh. It felt like she was at her limit again. Not weight, but her ability to keep track of different things in her mind.

The door looked like it should rise into the wall, not swing. It was wider than it was tall. Trying to find a way to open it, Shantae bumped the door. It was all it needed to begin rising with a rattle.

The chorus of angry hisses that greeted her made the girl jump. Several spiky apes, crowding a particular spot in a medium-sized hall, most of them already lighting fire in their claws... She fired unthinkingly. There was a mighty boom and the apes were gone in a macabre mockery of fireworks display, lots of parts flying, the ceiling above where they stood painted red.

Shantae gulped, revolted at the carnage she herself wreaked. That was careless. Both standing in front of the door as it was rising — her legs were visible long before she could see past it — and entering an enclosed space with the cannon readied. If any of these monsters stood next to the door, this entire yard would've been painted with _her_.

Taking several calming breaths — the ever-present carrion stench was helping as it was sufficiently distracting — she put the cannon away and investigated the room. There was nothing of use, some iron ornaments were just that. Sharp fragments of bone and occasional sticky, squishy, _still warm_ pieces she felt with her bare feet weren't helping her equilibrium.

Approaching the next door, Shantae stood beside it against the wall when she rapped it. The door obliged, rattling up. There were no sounds so far. She leaned around the doorframe to peek into the next room.

Five or six brutes stared back at her. A lone red flying ball in the back was almost an afterthought.

Shantae stared at the gathering of brutes, her eyes like saucers.

Then the silence was broken by a powerful chorus of angry roars. The flying maw adding its own crackling hiss went almost unnoticed.

Shantae ran very, very fast, her feet slapping against the floor, terror giving her strength, deadly green bolts flying past her, the heat of their passage against her bare skin motivating her go even faster.

She actually slipped on the pink beast remains, failed to slow down properly and fell down after rebounding off the far wall of the yard with her hands. It was a good thing too as several bolts of green fire zipped _just_ above her, exploding against the wall, washing her with intolerable heat. Jumping onto her feet, Shantae rushed to the rocky protrusions — which looked _much_ smaller now — and began jumping up them.

Her foot slipped when she was almost there. She clawed at the edge, practically throwing herself out of the deadly pit with her arms. Looking frantically around, she saw no flying monsters, so she took a second to choose a good spot. Finding a place where the jagged rock dropped just so.

Crouching behind this small drop with only her head and the cannon muzzle visible, she waited. Tense, exerting her will to slow her breathing and heartbeat down. Could brutes climb? She doubted that, but what if? Was there one of the red orb monsters? She was unsure.

Nothing came out of the pit yard. There were faint sounds of vicious tearing at first, then silence accentuated by that mysterious, faint, ever-present crackling. So, if there _was_ a red ball, it just managed to hit the brutes. Rest in pieces, stupid thing.

Catching herself on actually growing used to gore — imagining that monster's demise in too-too graphic detail didn't make her as horrified or nauseated as it should have — Shantae sighed. How much gore would she see - and inflict - before she finds her way back? Would she even fit back in Scuttle Town? Could she talk to children there again?

Putting the cannon away, she stood up. The monsters here were just reaping what they sow. She won't let herself be tainted by their blood — although she'd probably have to sit in the bathhouse for a week, to get the stench out, and dump everything she currently wore. When telling about this adventure she'd just be vague, mentioning "terrible" monsters and ordeals, but never, ever going into any detail.

She wiped gore off her sticky bare foot against the rock ground.

Even if she had to literally swim in blood it didn't matter while she held to the ideals of goodness in her heart. And she'd eventually meet someone else good... Or at least non-evil. Heroes fighting to clean this place? Rogues fighting to steal its treasures? If she finds them, she _will_ help them.

And, maybe, would learn something without stumbling around blindly.

The faint crackling was growing more distinct, coming — she was now sure — from the great void in the general direction of the boss tower. Which she could currently observe clearly in the distance against the orange sky. Something was going on!

Deciding she had to observe — the possibility to gain useful insight ganging up with curiosity on caution — Shantae began sneaking along the part of the mesa separating the ambush-laden gorge from the void. No one accosted her on the way, the flying red spheres being conveniently too lazy to be up there. Soon she reached one of the bonfire-bearing towers on the wall framing the big castle. And again, the wall was guarding nothing but bare rocks and that great ravine going down deeper and deeper, maybe even reaching the jungle down there. Searching for a good hiding spot, she found a rock outcropping breaking the wall and climbed up it. Reaching the edge, she peered down.

The sound was definitely coming from down in the abyss. Now more distinct she could tell it was probably shooting. Like, a lot of shooting. Like there was a whole army worth of gatlings going off. Accentuated by deep rumble and crackle of explosions.

The great red boss was agitated, walking around twice as fast as the last time she saw him.

Fascinated, she froze on the edge, hoping no one would spot her if she wasn't moving. With her tan body agaist the brown rock, and her red clothing with black pants seat in this world of red and black... Only her purple hair was contrasting with her surroundings. Shrugging, she flipped the ponytail over her shoulder to hug it, making less of the purple visible.

Then she waited.

The crackling was rising in intensity, powerful booms rumbling more often. Then stray fire began coming from beyond the many ledges and drops obscuring her direct view. She thought of gliding down there, then thought better. There was a fierce battle raging around the base of the crag this tower stood upon.

She saw a mechanical contraption once, resembling a cross of a dragonfly and a fish, it zipped far below. Was that a propeller on top? Sadly, it disappeared too fast to take a good look at it. After all these tinkertech muskets and cannons she wouldn't be surprised to see something that would make Techno Baron green with envy. Oh wait, he was already green, what with him being a gator-man.

The battle was gaining in intensity. She saw both gates on the ends of the bridge lower, a _large_ group of red brutes leaving the castle to walk purposefully towards the boss tower. A dozen or so pink gorillas trailed them, making a run for it before the gate closed again cutting off most of their herd.

Have she been feeling powerful and confident and stuff after finding the cannon? No, no. She must have been mistaken. If this hell could roll out armies like this, they'd simply stampede her, leaving a bloodstain beside an empty cannon — and not even slow their march. These monsters were brutal, pig-headed and never backed from a fight, no matter the odds. The only way to get through them, besides sneaking, was having more ammo than they had warm bodies.

She glimpsed the boss having mechanical feet with huge metallic hooves before the gate closed again.

The wait continued, tense. Then boring. Minutes were stretching into what felt like hours. The sounds of battle from below were receding, cracks and booms sounding at a slower rate. Huh, that was it?

Then her world was shaken by a roar so mighty even the rocks under her hands and knees trembled. Frozen in terror, Shantae only realized a few seconds later it was the boss roaring his challenge.

The tower top erupted with titanic explosions. Roaring in fury, the boss was chasing someone hidden by the tall embattled walls. Twin streams of tiny bluish-white lights were whipping back at him, tiny flashes blossoming on his massive body.

It should have ended quickly and decisively, but whoever was down there, their dodging skills must have been outstanding. The boss was chasing them left and right, firing his huge cannons and breathing fire - whole rivers of fire! - but still the battle raged on, the streams of bluish sparks rarely ceasing, even if sometimes missing, their curves disappearing in the orange sky in dispersing arches.

How much stamina and ammo did the unknown challenger have?

The boss was looking more and more charred, his health being slowly chipped away. Shantae noticed with alarm half a dozen red balls rising from somewhere in the mesa behind her, moving over her head towards the tower, undoubtedly to ambush the hero — for who but a hero would be brave enough to stand against such a boss?

Unsure what to do, Shantae hesitated. She should probably help, but she didn't know how far her cannon could shoot nor how fast the things it shot really were. So far it had been press the trigger and instant boom, at fairly short distances. And these monstrous raspberries were deceptively nimble.

While she was caught in indecision, the boss exploded, shaking the earth, the resulting cloud of fire and blood and black smoke rising higher than the central tower of the tower top. The gate opened... Wait, both gates opened releasing the full load of monsters! There was a river of pink flowing across the bridge now, too many gorillas to count.

Then explosions began blossoming among their front ranks, blood and parts flying into the abyss or staining the bluish-black obsidian of bridge. But the herd pressed on, flowing in faster than they were obliterated. Shantae saw a man in familiar green armor with a beige-gray helmet walking out onto the bridge, visible beyond the monsters thanks to her elevated position. He was holding a familiar cannon, firing from the hip. Six shots - he throws a drum away - six shots - he throws another drum away. It looked like he may mow the pink beasts down before they reach him, but then the red orbs began shooting at him, belching thunderballs, making him pause to dodge.

Her decision made, Shantae pulled out her own cannon to aim at the red spheres. Wow, they exploded into a cloud of bright blue blood after a single hit. Also, her suspicion was right: the booms this cannon fired were rockets! She replaced an empty drum.

The red monsters lost half their number before turning on her. Dodging their thunderballs was easy, but she had to watch behind her to avoid hurting herself with the butt blast. And they were dodging her rockets, she wasted four by now failing to hit even once.

There was a crackling buzz, which made her gut clench for some reason, then the spheres were hit by a hail of bullets from behind, wincing and twitching and just hanging there in indecision. Exploiting the moment, Shantae hastily replaced the ammo drum and hit two more, exploding them into blue viscera. One glance at the man in green showed he was now toting a _painfully_ familiar sleek gatling, the nigh-solid stream of bullets cutting into the last monster's back. Finally it fell, its last sound a pitiful bleating.

But now the bridge was full of spiky apes, the man in green dodging a hail of fireballs even as he was mowing them down.

Glad to be helpful, Shantae fired three rockets into the brown crowd, wreaking havoc and devastation. Surviving apes turned to lob fireballs at her. She was dodging and ducking easily, until the hero cut them all down.

Kicking the last brown ape to the ground, the man in green pounced it and began beating it to death with his bare hands until its skull just gave, brains splattering the ground around them.

"Sh..should you do that?" Shantae called, unease creeping into her, only to be met with inscrutable glass of his helmet as he froze turning his head at her, blood dripping slowly from his upraised fist stilled mid-motion.

(シーンブレイク)


	5. Purple-haired Warrior Maiden

**Too Nice for Such Brutality**  
by Cheb

Shantae was created by and belongs to Matt Bozon and WayForward. DooM II was created by id software and belongs to Bethesda. Brutal DooM mod is being created by Sergeant Mark IV

 **Chapter 5,  
Purple-haired Warrior Maiden**

The giant cyberdemon was one mean beast. Fast, tough, throwing around overwhelming firepower, he was bred - or designed, or how else they give birth to these abominations - to be the ultimate showstopper, able to obliterate any number of forces in this masterfully organized chokepoint.

He doubled as a point defense platform too, our two lost copters being testament to that.

Anything our Marine Corps could throw at it, it would grind to dust.

Except me.

My aptitude for allotech was a weird one. A rare one. While your average test subject could hold one spare weapon in their hammerspace pocket, rarely two, I... I'm not really sure what my limit _was_. While most guys could manage a burst of super-speed, I could move continuously for sizable lengths of time. Are you trying to become a race-car, Blazkowicz, they joked good-naturedly. While my tech was in fact more like ice-skating. Across uneven ground. In combat boots.

There were so few of us, attuned to the alloenergies without nasty side effects. It's clear now, _why_. After the hell UAC had been courting came loose, the revelation _where_ they were getting their knowledge from sent many of us reeling. Ancient Chinese martial arts my ass. Whatever those Chi-practizing grandpas use, I'm sure it doesn't come with corruption of the user's mind. Nor do they empower average Joes in the course of weeks. Me? I just grit my teeth and pushed my will against the temptations, the mindless bloodlust. I don't know if that Blazkowicz who put his bullet through Hitler's brain was really my great- great- great-, but the name obliges to carry it with honor. To give my inner predator purpose and unleash it at the hellspawn.

With most of us, the experimental super-soldiers, lost in the mess of the Incident, I remained only one — to my knowledge — who could challenge an APC in open field and win. Decisively. As many of the beefier demons didn't live long enough to learn.

This operation, this push back into the Hell, was organized on such a short notice. The Command was reacting to the unexpected, the unthinkable. That's why this entire offensive depended so heavily on me. This wasn't the proper way, military operations shouldn't hang on one unique asset, but the humanity — represented by the Marine Corps here and now — didn't have luxury of time to study the enemy, to develop strategies and war machines specifically adapted for the demonic threat. We only had me to be the point of this assault, the spear tip that penetrates the enemy armor, driven by the rest of the shaft and the arm behind it, to do the required work on the enemy's insides. Ripping and tearing them.

Being such a special snowflake, I had no right to fall here. So I didn't. I used my training, my allo-abilities and my dual plasma guns to their fullest effect. The giant cyberdemon never managed to land a hit on me.

Now he was still raining around me, blood and burnt ashes, his pillbox-sized hooves the only solid chunks left. And I could take a few moments to just stand there, reminiscing.

As soon as the elevator goes all the way down and back - a bloody long journey - my fellow Marines would establish their beachhead here. I only had to hold this position for them... And here we go. Hell doesn't play fair. The gate had opened at some point and there was a literal flood of pinkies stampeding towards me across a bridge, with a flight of cacodemons hurrying to give them air support.

My energy cells nearly depleted, I whipped out the rocket launcher walking out to meet them head on. That was hell of a lot of pinkies, coming faster than my weapon was eliminating them. I was moving them down, but they persisted. Then the cacos went in, firing and moving to flank me. Just when I thought I'd have to pull out the super shotgun and _dance_ , the cacos started exploding. Someone from the _other_ side was firing rockets at them.

Had someone from the ill-fated recon drop teams survived? It seems I was not the first man to set foot here in the upper Hell. Anyway, this breather was welcome if not entirely necessary. I managed to blow the rabid pinkies up before they reached me, kicking the last straggler into the abyss: this bridge didn't have any railing. Whoever it was that helped me, he was under fire now, launching rocket after rocket at the cacos and missing. These beasts are surprisingly agile when they want to be, firing unguided rockets at them head-on is just wasting ammunition. Ignoring the incoming horde of imps for now, I switched to the minigun, spraying the cacos from behind. Me and that guy on the cliff quickly disposed of them. It was about time as the imps opened on me. Dancing between their projectiles, I began cutting them down. This push was becoming very ammunition-costly even for one-man arsenal like me.

In a show of quick thinking my ally fired into the crowd of brown beasts, using up only three rockets where I would have expended a sizable chunk of my rounds. Quickly eliminating the remaining few I jumped the last one to recharge my energy in a bout of mindless brutality.

This was just how it worked, ever since the hell came loose. I am convinced it is either a natural law of this place or a plan of not-so-subtle temptation laid out by some intelligent arch-demon. Or both. So far I was able to resist succumbing to it, knowing firmly what I was fighting for. My cause was righteous, however banal that may sound.

Then my ally made themselves known, and... Have you ever felt awkward on the verge of mortified? Like walking down a street and then suddenly realizing you didn't have any pants on? Like making a casual comment and then realizing you offended your squadmate's beliefs something horrible?

It was one of _those_ moments.

Instead of a fellow grizzled marine, a half-naked teenage girl was staring at me, leaning on a rocket launcher too big for her, already growing green around the gills at my... display.

I froze like a deer in headlights. The imp brains splattered around suddenly felt like a damning evidence.

The awkward silence was stretching, accentuated by distant sounds of gunfire. I forced myself to speak:

"This is... how replenishing energy works here. I'm not proud of this, and I know this is a slippery path, but I need every edge to make my job done."

I don't know what I was expecting, but...

"Oh!" She visibly relaxed. "You did that to recharge your mana!" Her voice was full of relief. "I... I don't think I'd be able to do it that way if I still had my magic."

Wait, what?

Making the rocket launcher vanish — so she knew that allotech? — the girl... Stepped casually off the edge! My shout died on my lips as a purple bubble inflated with a dull whomp in her upraised hands. She then proceeded gliding towards me like it was a high quality paraglider, not something barely two feet across. The white ornament of a skull and crossbones was just making it more incongruous.

So... magic. Overcoming my lingering awkwardness, I took a good, hard look at this cute little thing. An exotic dancer outfit, leaving very little to imagination, the bottom of these flaring harem pants and the girl's bare feet stained with brown crust that was likely dried blood. Shiny but perfectly functional bracers protecting her forearms. Impossibly long hair done in this cliché "genie" ponytail. And finally her ears laden with large golden rings. Quite and unmistakably long and pointed.

Not a human.

You may have a first contact situation on your hands, Flynn, I thought numbly.

What I did, though, was clamping down on the "she's just a kid!" urge. _Hard_. Had to remember she was a fellow warrior, despite my fatherly instincts — I honestly didn't know I had them in me, until now — insisting that magical girls should live in their fairy-tale kingdoms fighting family-friendly cartoony monsters rather than going through this meat-grinder of a Hell.

The alien girl landed nimbly on the bridge close to me. I thought I noticed her gliding bubble collapsing into a fancy pirate hat before vanishing. Wary, perky and cute like... Like a mongoose, I suppose. You know, those critters, lean and flexible, merry and playful... Until they happen upon a snake.

I stood up wiping my fist, still self-consciously, to find she barely reached up to my chin. Including that high ponytail uplifted by a golden flute-like thing. "Gunnery sergeant Flynn Blazkowicz," I offered. "Allotech Division of Marine Corps. Callsign Doomguy."

"Shantae," she offered in return, smiling. Damn, that was some devastating cuteness. "Guardian Genie of Scuttle Town... Well, half-Genie... Former half-Genie..."

Then we noticed the elephant in the room, both seemingly at once:

"Hey, you aren't speaking English!" / "Hey, you are speaking the Old World Tongue!"

So, unless she was pretending — unlikely, if my hunch to be believed — there was some reality warping in effect. Focused either around me, her, or this place in general. I couldn't tell what language she was speaking, it sounded vaguely middle-Eastern. And yet, I could perfectly understand her. "Old world tongue", though?

But, first things first. Was she from a parallel universe? From the future?

"I don't know how or why we can understand each other," I said neutrally, "But this is quite convenient, don't you think? We don't have to resort to gestures and charades to understand each other."

"Yeah," she chirped happily. "You are the first person... that..." Her face fell. "There was another man in armor like yours, captured by these monsters. I freed him, but then... things went wrong. More monsters appeared suddenly. I... tried drawing their attention to myself while he was reloading his musket, but then he shot them all at once and they turned on him. And killed him before I could do anything. I didn't even know his name."

Now, that told me quite a bit. She was decisive and kind-hearthed enough to save a complete stranger, not shying from drawing fire to help him. Too bad she was obviously beating herself over her perceived failure. The demons, they only care about those they could subvert. The weak-willed, the dumb, the reckless. Those they treat with kiddie gloves. The real, unyielding marines knowing the meaning of duty and honor? They make bloody ikebanas out of them.

"Don't blame yourself," I said. "The demons only take weakest soldiers prisoner. Those who doesn't even know to dodge."

"Oh." She perked up, her eyes lighting up with understanding. "Oh! But not dodging, that's... that's..." Her voice conveyed so much consternation I thought she wanted to call that guy a fucking moron but was too polite. "That's _wrong_!"

And here comes another tidbit. Combat style focused on dodging — if the lack of armor wasn't telling enough — could mean... In fact it could mean different things. That she was better at it than me. Or that she came from a place where they used only slow projectiles, like fireballs and arrows, and only sheer luck kept her alive in firefights so far. Calling a firearm one of our fellow marines carried a "musket" was telling enough.

"You wouldn't die on me, won't you?" she asked suddenly, both hopeful and fearful. "I don't want to be in this hell alone again. I know too little about it, I' was just stumbling blindly!"

"I won't." I smiled reassuringly. Then I remembered I still had my helmet on. "I'm not some weak soldier, I'm the best super-soldier there is." She smiled at that. It was just a stated fact, though. No bravado or anything of the sorts. "I won't fall while my country and my whole world is depending on me," I finished. Another flat fact.

"So your country is at war with this realm?" she said, concern evident in her voice. "Have they invaded you?"

"Yeah," I replied. "They have. Beyond this big tower," I pointed, "There is a huge portal they had opened into the heart of one of our cities. To send amassed forces through. It was... bad. Now we are pushing them back."

"Oh." Her face told me she understood. There are things you don't need to say aloud. It's enough to know these beasts and what they do.

"And you?" I finally got to ask. "What are _you_ doing here?"

"I'm... trying to find a way home," she admitted. "I got stranded here because I mistook a warp platform for a pressure plate."

"A teleporter?" Wasn't that concerning. "Are your people using teleporters?"

"No, this was the first one I ever saw," she said, confused. "We got— Oh, are you afraid they'd invade my land too? Don't worry. I found that thing deep in a... different hell, you can say, although that one was much hotter and not nearly as nasty as this one. Its entrance is well guarded, I had to cheat pretending some sort of mutant buffalo to get in. Oh, the entrance itself is hidden deep inside a place where lost souls stay. And the entrance to _that_ is well guarded too, I had to cheat pretending a twelve-thousand years old eldritch thing just to enter. And it's deep inside of a dangerous island no one in their right mind would visit. So..."

There was a _long_ story behind her appearance, I just knew it.

And just then my radio crackled to life bearing... bad news. Capital "B" bad. Obviously, Hell wasn't going to run out of cannon fodder anytime soon. Whar we overcame on our way to the tower had just been a warm-up. The fortresses blocking paths on the plains below, weren't locked up anymore. They stopped waiting and watching, they joined forces to march against us, mortals. Gates barring pathways and gorges flung their doors open, unending hordes flowing through them like rivers. Our side would simply run out of ammo sooner or later.

Options were considered. We couldn't shut down or destroy the portal for some reason - I wasn't on the need to know list. The main force would eventually fall back to our side and hold the line there. But the command had me exactly where they wanted me: deep in the enemy territory. It was believed that if I moved quickly, only local garrisons would oppose me, due to hubris of their commanding officers. Yes, the analysts all but assured that Hell wasn't one big happy family.

Having killed more hell-spawn by provoking infighting than I did with my own hands, I was inclined to agree. Unless I attract whatever eye of Sauron the mastermind devil was using, I could penetrate deep into Hell. Hopefully, finding the fucker himself and acquainting him with the business end of my biggest, baddest gun.

So... My chances of survival? Ha, very funny.

And then this alien girl, Shantae, piped in, fascinated by my radio. Wonderful. Now I had to report my first contact to the Command, apprehensive they'd demand something stupid. They chattered back and forth for a bit. There was shock of understanding her gibberish — only those currently in Hell could do that, by the way, radio operators working as translators for the brass back on Earth. They were fascinated with the living confirmation of the many-worlds theory, mined the girl for information learning she was living happily in a world running on magic and weird technology while overall tech level matched our seventeenth century... And where English was a dead language of the ancients. The girl herself was sixteen. Probably. She was uncertain of her own age for some reason. Her language was tentatively designated as Bashkir.

While that was happening I kept watch, also surveying our surroundings. The outer gate of this castle was lowered into the ground revealing a small square yard with another, similar gate still up. Like an airlock-style batch bin for monsters, I suppose. There were two small doors in the side walls. I kicked both. The right one was locked while the left one rattled open revealing a dark tunnel. Some sort of caves? There were rocky outcroppings peeking from beyond this wall, not buildings.

Thankfully, level heads prevailed in the end. However much it pained me, this girl's life was irrelevant. Mine was irrelevant in as much as I was a unique asset tasked with sabotaging the enemy. This was just the brutal reality of the situation. After seeing what these monstrosities did in Los Angeles, nothing mattered but stopping them for good. Dying in the process? Losing my soul? Acceptable collateral damage.

I did what I could, offering her a chance to reach safety. With this magical paraglider of hers, she could just drop down the elevator shaft while the platform was still descending. There was a team in the foothills keep, they were going to hold the tower's base for at least a little while. They could evac her to Earth where she'd get help of the few remaining portal specialists. While most of UAC labs and personnel were lost, knowledge remained. This box of Pandora would remain forever open.

Guess what? She refused. Just flat out refused. Letting me go alone through this wasn't something her conscience could bear. Besides, the portal home had to be out there. She "had a hunch".

I tried arguing, I really did. I almost managed to dissuade her. Almost. In the end it was the argument about the way home being there — maybe, possibly — that tipped the balance. All I achieved was poking at this girl's insecurities about not being a proper hero or something stupid like that. Which made me feel like an utter asshole.

Teenagers. I am... patently unsuitable for dealing with them and their ridiculous sensibilities.

So I found myself on a suicide mission with an unexpected tagalong. Whose abilities were unknown to me and who had no idea of basic things like tactical signs, command slang and, I feared, even basic weapon care.

"Listen," I told her. "I don't think of you less because you're a gal. I don't think you are a bad hero either. But you are deep in unfamiliar crap and don't have time to learn the ropes. While I... My mission is so vital I can't afford being a decent guy. If you offer help, I would accept it. But if _you_ get yourself into a tight spot I cannot promise I'd save you. If you get captured a bullet could be the best I could offer.

"That may be... preferable," she said quietly, shuddering at some memory. Then she lifted her gaze, staring at me with fierce determination of a cute attack kitten. It made my heart clench. "I wouldn't even think of slowing you down. If I fall behind, so be it. I'd just be on my own."

Guess, she wasn't your average teenager. Being a "hero"... Fatherly instincts, shaddap! Being a "hero", whatever the exact definition, implies responsibility, self-sufficiency and ability to take measured risks, not unlike an NCO. The very fact she didn't just survive here, but acquired a rocket launcher, was telling.

"So..." I said, breaking the awkward silence. "You came from the other side, right? What... points of interest could you tell me about?"

She hummed thoughtfully, chewing her lip, but stopped hugging her ridiculously long ponytail, a gesture that had been radiating timid inadequacy. Good.

"This entire mesa is cut across with gorges plugged with small castles," she began. "There are two paths that lead down into the blood swamp, one main route and one sort of back trail. The main road leads through this big castle ahead. I... don't know what is inside, but I don't think those beasts were all there was. I can, probably, lead you through the back trail because that was one castle more or less open that I could look into. But there are monsters waiting patiently on the approach to it, they set quite an ambush."

"And how did you avoid them?" I asked.

Could she turn invisible?

"Um, by sneaking along the top of the mesa? They don't look up." She demonstrated by climbing up the wall of red stone blocks framing the closed inner gate.

 _That_ you don't see every day. Even famous climbers can't move that fast so effortlessly. So. Superhuman strength? Most likely.

"See?" The girl turned around looking at me from the top. "I can—"

And then she was suddenly on fire. Goddamn viles!

Yelping, she dove from the wall to tumble through the air and land on her feet like a cat. And like with cats, it looked absolutely effortless but the sound told otherwise, a resounding thud of a fifty-kilogram girl dropping ten meters.

"It happened again..." the girl complained. "And I still don't know what it was." She was visibly unsettled, staring up at the last flickers of dying flames.

"It was a vile," I grit through clenched teeth. "I _hate_ viles, these motherfucking pieces of—"

She coughed, blushing. Oh, snap.

"So, there _is_ a monster that sets you on fire by just looking at you," she said, visibly relieved.

I can relate. There is weird shit that just happens and there is weird shit thrown at you by enemy you can fight back. Makes all the difference.

"Don't be complacent," I warned. "If you don't break line of sight soon enough, that fire explodes blowing you to cinders."

"How soon?" she asked, shivering a bit.

"About two seconds," I said, forcing my fists to unclench. Her pose made it painfully clear she had been miliseconds from being incinerated at some point. "Thankfully, they have rigid timing to their... spell, they cannot interrupt it and are forced to stand still." I demonstrated the interval by opening, then closing my hand. "But!" I accentuated my voice, like when addressing a green recruit — which wasn't far from reality. "If you stick your head out before that interval runs out, they re-acquire and you are toast. In fact, they can freely change targets any time until it goes off. Maneuvering so that a knight or baron hits the vile may save your a— hem... bacon."

She made a thoughtful sound. Damn, even her grunts were devastatingly cute. "Are there other monsters I should be wary of? I mean, I learned of _invisible_ pink gorillas by accident, almost jumped into a pit with them... Oh, and my danger sense is pretty good, but three zombies firing their gatling muskets at me at once would be too much of a gamble."

"Run that by me again?" I wonder what she meant by 'danger sense'. And "gatling muskets"?

"Well... Here." She produced a bog standard AR-97 holding it out to me. "They were using these things."

"Oh. This is what we call assault rifle. Uh, because the barrel is rifled to spin-stabilize the bullet." I checked the safety. It was on full auto.

She noticed my actions and explained: "I keep that lock lever thingie turned to gatling mode because I am only going to have it out when I am about to fire it."

That... actually made sense. With hammerspace arsenals, gun safety rules had to be adapted. Still, one question remained. "What did you mean by danger sense?" I inquired as I handed the assault rifle back to her.

"Well, when you sense someone aiming at you," she explained like it was obvious, "and dodge bullets, arrows and other nasties before they are even fired. Don't you have that as well?"

That was impressive. Really impressive, on the border of real superpowers.

"No," I admitted. "Those who trained us... Didn't quite have that technique down. I rely on my basic human senses and reflexes to avoid enemy fire. And when that fails there is my armor. But most important rule is killing them faster than they can shoot at you. No dallying, no playing around, always eliminating the bogeys as quickly and efficiently as you can. Dead do not bite... Uh, if you count zombies as alive, which they sort of are."

"That seems like a good strategy. Only... When I just got here, I had problems doing enough damage," she admitted. "You see, I'm a melee fighter most of the time, and without my magic my only ranged attack is this pirate pistol." She demonstrated a bulky handgun that looked belonging in a museum. "It got unending magical ammo, but..." She fired what looked like a baby plasma bolt into distance. "It's a pea-shooter. I hit harder and faster with my hair. So when I found myself in a locked room with a brute, it took me too long to wear him down. Was a pretty harrowing experience!" she finished on incongruously upbeat note.

"Your... hair?" I asked, feeling incredulous. "And... which of the demons do you call brutes?"

She then proceeded demonstrating the most ridiculous fighting move I ever heard of, flexing her entire body back and forth to strike at the gate with her hair like it was a whip!

And at such fast rate too! How doesn't she get whiplash? Why doesn't become dizzy from whipping her head back and forth like this?

But, however ridiculous, it was functional. There were little dents left in the rock-hard wood, the gate being chipped a bit.

What is functional is not ridiculous.

"That's one unconventional technique," I commented. "But, whatever works. And the so called brutes are...?"

"Ummm... Big, twice taller than me, all solid muscle, have goat-dog heads and hooves, their hands glow dangerous green? It took _dozens_ of hair whips to bring that one down, I was on my last legs when it finally fell... Oh, and it was a brown one, not red one."

That was... Simply and undeniably badass.

"We call them Hell knights," I told her. "I am impressed with your skill and bravery. Truly impressed."

She may have the form of a teenage girl, but her heart was that of a warrior. A... warrior maiden, if you have.

"I was just very, very scared," she tried downplaying it. "Normally I can deflect sword blows with my bracers. Even strong ones. But that green flame around that thing's hands... It looked like it'd cleave straight though my bracer with its claws, or worse, grab my arm and tear it off. I really couldn't afford to be hit here. I mean, in this hell in general."

"Then viles and revenats are the most dangerous foes for you," I told her. "Viles, of arch-viles, are the smart ones. These moth— scum are the masterminds. They look like very tall naked men with yellowish skin and large horns. You saw their flame attack. They can also raise dead demons by just walking by. It is very important to take them out first, otherwise they'd just drown you in endless cannon fodder."

"Got it." She nodded seriously. "And the reveeh... nats?"

"Revenants are those giant skeletons in armor. They are most dangerous to you because some of their fireballs are homing. Your danger sense would be useless against projectiles that chase you like bloodhounds to catch you when you are least expecting them and explode with a powerful concussive blast so that even dodging the fireball itself doesn't guarantee you avoid taking damage. Thankfully, they _do_ have limited turning radius, you can make them steer into a wall by hiding behind a corner. But never assume a revenant had missed until you hear the explosion."

"Oh... There were two of them in a crater over there." She pointed to the left of the main route. "Along with half dozen of those red spheres and lots of spiky apes."

"We should get moving," I said. "Before that vile decides to act siccing more demons on us."

She gasped. "You're right! The pink gorillas that went out to the bridge... I thought that was all of them, but now I'm thinking back, and... This entire castle," She gestured ahead, "was full of them. There must be three times more beyond this gate!" She was now looking at the gate with apprehension.

"Any ideas where does this lead?" I pointed at the left door.

"To that gorge with a big ambush inside," she replied without pause. "Oh, that's why they left the door open!"

That made sense. Confirming the maxim about commanders being dicks to each other as well. Why waste your own pinkies when you can funnel the enemy to your neighbor's keep?

Shantae — and I made effort to think of her by her name, not "the girl", this was the least I could do for her — suggested we'd climb onto the mesa top and avoid confrontation altogether. Alas, while I could outrun a race horse I have the climbing ability of a lead brick. While we did not have any rope. Half a kingdom for a rope.

So I handed her all my grenades explaining briefly the dos and donts. She was a smart girl and knew the power of modern weaponry already. In return, she handed me three scrolls of dense paper saying she was at her capacity and this magic was useless in this hell anyway. I tucked them into a free pouch on my belt.

Then we strolled through the dark tunnel out into a suspiciously empty looking gorge. This place was a mess, with jutting chunks of rock and craters filled with boiling magma. Did the giant red cyberdemon throw a fit here or something?

Waiting until Shantae climbs the jagged rock wall - she was fast - I strolled forward into the ambush, shotgun in hand. A couple imps jumped out at me, I mowed them down without slowing. Was this to lull me into complacence or had those been just impatient?

There was a small castle ahead, with the gorge opening wide on the approach to it, rocky walls curving out of my sight. The imps manning two guard towers framing the castle gate noticed me and began lobbing fireballs.

I haven't had a chance to reach the main ambush spot when these baby plasma bolts flew across the gorge, from high up to the left to somewhere to the right hidden from my sight by the rock wall curvature. There were roars of pain as hidden zombies opened on the cliff top. Followed by more roars of pain from the left, then retaliatory fireballs. That was clever! Zombies have horrible aim, always spraying wide so making them instigate infighting is relatively easy.

I stopped, waiting for more demons to bring each other down. The fight was gaining in intensity as more zombies hit by stray fireballs opened fire at the imps and more imps hit by stray bullets took offense.

When it was already dying down, I saw movement on top of the left guard tower. Shantae's purple hair was unmistakable. Leaning over the edge, she pulled out a grenade, fumbled with it for a bit, then tossed it into one of the wide windows. And pulled back sharply, ducking out of sight.

The explosion blew dust out of the windows, body parts flying, some demons roaring in pain. But the spirited girl wasn't wasting time, already on the second tower, leaning down and pulling out... that fancy pistol of hers?

Three shots later, roars of angered knights told me, why. Shantae pulled back and ducked out of sight just as barrage of green fiery projectiles hit the tower, some of them hitting imps inside through the windows. One became charred meat instantly, another one roared in pain and lobbed its own fireball in return. The resulting shootout was brief, the knights quickly ran out of imps to snipe.

And were greeted by my shotgun. With the demons distracted, it was easy to shoot them precisely in the heads. One, rarely two shots was all it took for beheaded hulks to slump to the ground. I then quickly mopped up remaining zombies on the right, followed by remaining imps on the left.

Shantae, meanwhile, slid into the right tower's window. There was a snarl of a pinkie, a girlish yelp, then frantic automatic fire in ragged bursts followed by a dull thud of the beast falling dead. Then I was greeted by the sight of an imp being kicked over the wall, Shantae's red pants and dirty heel flashing briefly. The beast grunted petulantly before crunching dead. And then the gate began rising, releasing a small crowd of imps. Shoot, shoot, shoot, reload, shoot again. Not a single shell wasted, I finished the last one with a kick of my own. There was no need for brutality, I felt fine.

I walked into cavernous interior of the castle. There was a thud as Shantae landed beside me, forgoing the slow elevator. "There's that cauldron-like crater," she whispered, pointing to the left. There was light of the... Could we call it a day? coming from that direction. To the right, there were two arches facing an open, empty yard. I followed my guide there. The yard was framed by a wall with huge teeth, crags towering in distances could be glimpsed in the gaps.

"Now if—" Shantae began but suddenly emitted a strangled yelp. I turned around in an instant. She was jumping around on one foot while clutching at her other foot with both hands and hissing in pain. "Careful," she grit out. "The blood here is boiling hot!"

I eyed the red pond taking a good chunk of the yard, flowing out through a break in the wall. "Why are you barefoot anyway?" I asked.

"I don't want to lose my last good shoes." She demonstrated what was essentially a pair of flats with pointy tips curved upwards. "These are hardy, usually I don't mind going through wilderness in them, even bogs, but wading through blood would ruin them." She put the shoes away.

"Wading?" I asked, puzzled.

"D'uh, I told you: blood swamp. It's just that: a swamp filled with blood instead of water, with reeds and bushes along the shores and stuff. Only with blood. Or did you think," she smiled impishly, "that I just asked some monster to name geographical features...? Come on, let's... Oh, waid, I got an idea! She climbed onto the rightmost wall tooth deftly like monkey to uump onto neighboring cliff and disappear among rock ledges.

I sighed. No warning, no asking for confirmation. Her teamworking skills needed lots work. Still, while she was scouting ahead I used the chance to approach the wall and take the first good look in the direction we should be traveling.

What should I say? Visibility sucked, with all the darkness resembling black fog, hiding everything below. The fast-moving orange clouds were suitably hellish and those jutting crags scattered all around would serve a suitable landmarks. The compass wasn't working here, I checked. I hoped the mastermind devil was cliché enough to make a highly visible lair among the tallest mountains. All the easier to find it.

"I'm back!" Shantae announced appearing on the same wall tooth like a jack-in-the-box. "And there is indeed a path to sneak around! First, let's get you onto this მერლონ."

"Uh, did you mean this wall tooth?" I asked. This was the first time the mysterious translation effect failed me, probably because our vocabularies weren't overlapping entirely.

"Yep," was her upbeat reply. "Or, you can go through that door over there, and tear your way through who knows how many monsters. Pink gorillas, I can vouch for: I saw them through a window. Lots. But if you climb onto this, you can then jump onto that rock ledge over there and I believe you could then bypass this castle completely. Well, almost: there were two red brutes, I mean barons, miling around on the bridge."

"I'm sorry," I apologized measuring the tooth that was higher than I was tall. Counting from the gap between them, not from the ground. "I don't think I can climb that."

"Oh come on," she said. "I'll help you."

"I weigh a ton," I warned. "With my armor, and the weight of my arsenal partially transferring..."

"So what?" She took it as a challenge. "I am stronger than I look!"

So. Helping me onto the gap between the teeth was easy, it wasn't that higher than your average parapet. Getting me to the top, though... We tried this, and tried that, until finally I had to concede to the most ridiculous method of using Shantae's ponytail as a rope while she was clutching at the top, grunting and groaning in exertion.

In the end we succeeded. Damn, but this gal got one hell of a neck! After pulling me up she just cracked her neck a couple times and was on her merry way. The path wasn't as easy as she made it sound, but we made it to a bridge. I had pleasure watching through a glassed window as monsters inside the last room scrambled into monster closets, no doubt to wait for me. And we just sneaked by.

The two barons guarding the bridge weren't that much of a challenge, to be honest. Shantae made it even easier, shooting one to attract its fire, then jumping into the void to glide in circles and loops on her purple bubble. I beheaded the barons with my minigun one after another, then began crossing the bridge. When I reached the other side, both Shantae and six cacos caught up with me. These things must have been laying in ambush waiting for sounds of gunfire!

I began quickly mowing them down one after another. Damn, I was running low on ammo for the minigun. I switched to the shotgun. The flying beasts were troublesome as always, dodging and backing away and moving in short bursts of speed sideways after being hit. Very deceptive: leave one behind your back and it'll close up rapidly to bite you in the back. With jaws that put any gator to shame.

That was exactly what happened to Shantae: carried away with dueling one caco from the bridge, that pistol versus its thunderballs, she missed a second one that dove at her from behind. The warning shout died on my lips as I missed — why now, of all times! — and the huge spherical beast fell on the girl, its jaws snapping shut with a clang of metal. Thankfully, she managed to stick her bracers out in the last possible moment. I shot again - and missed again as the demon pressed down practically crushing Shantae into the narrow gap between the parapets! Its jaws began snapping and I was about to scream in anger and avenge my fallen comrade by tearing the thing's eye out with my hands when it suddenly froze, lifting up with ridiculously lost expression on its leathery face, its cyclopic eye blinking in confusion.

Notably, there was no sign of Shantae, or any pieces of her, or any traces of blood whatsoever.

What. The. Fuck.

Then its maw began opening slowly, accompanied with cute girlish grunts of effort. Lo and behold, Shantae was standing there, looking unhurt, pushing against the jaws with her feet and shoulders. The expression on the cacodemon's face was priceless. But if it tries to fire...

"Are we... Above the bridge now?" the unyielding girl grit out.

"Yes, square and center," I confirmed, not risking another shot at the moment.

"Good." There was suddenly a huge curved sword in her hands. The next moment the caco snapped its jaws shut, resistance seemingly vanishing. Resulting in the tip of the sword emerging from its face with a wet crunch, right through the huge green eye.

Twitching, the round thing fell onto the bridge with a meaty thud, the sword sticking out even more.

Finishing the last flying caco almost as an afterthought, I ran to help my partner get out, carefully pulling the toothy jaw open.

"Yeech," Shantae complained good-naturedly. "This thing last brushed its teeth, like, never!"

"Please," I grit out, "Don't scare me like that again."

"I'm not planning to," she promised walking after me across the bridge. "I won't forget how sneaky these balls are. To be honest, the only monsters back home with comparable maw size are water dragons and giant snails. Both like scenery hazards, never pursuing, only snapping at you if you run in front of them. Shall we?" She stepped absent-mindedly into a pool of blood cut into the flat portion of this outstanding rock spire.

"Um, are you...?"

"Don't worry," she replied airily. "The blood here is just hot, not boiling. It gets even colder down there in the swamps." She then disappeared in a dark tunnel.

I followed, finding an elevator platform there. When it began descending, the look was undeniably scenic. Shantae was gawking around, incongruously upbeat, as the world grew dark around us, the sky fading from orange to crimson, the pointed roofs of that huge castle looming above like black cut-outs against the rolling red.

(シーンブレイク)


	6. Almost too Easy

**Chapter 6,  
Almost too Easy**

She was accompanying an actual, honest hero, adventuring together and helping him, even if a little! Shantae wasn't exactly giddy — this was a grim adventure — but she was feeling the well of inexhaustible optimism deep in her heart bubbling and swelling, washing away doubts and fears.

"And here," she told Doomguy as she hopped lightly over a pit of stakes, "lies the yellow key." She pointed to the right, at the blue skull bars, flaming skulls milling behind them. "I know where the blue one— Wait, is that light reaching from above?" She climbed the rock with gusto, only to find that yes, the skull room had an opening in its roof, and no, it was barred. "We won't be cheating around this one," she admitted jumping down a four-fathom drop without a second thought. "If only we had a rope! I know where the blue key is, but that place is... It's a trap but I couldn't figure it out."

They came upon the blood channel.

"Huh," Doomguy said surveying their surroundings with caution. "Hell really is _Vyhentham_."

"Veeth.. Nam?" She repeated the unfamiliar word.

"Never mind," he grumbled. "That's ancient family history now. Think of jungle swarming with bad guys and devious spike traps. When I was told we were going to sortie into Hell, I thought there would be more... fire and molten sulfur."

Shantae recalled her la— most recent dungeon. "Fire and boiling sulfur? That sounds like Oubilette of Suffering. And it would be... much easier to deal with. I suppose this is just a harder hell?" She glanced around at thee walls of dense shrubbery.

"They set ambushes along these blood-rivers," Doomguy said like he was stating a fact, following her gaze.

"Well, yes. I found one, with three zombies sitting just behind bushes, not far from here. I only scouted thoroughly in a... different place," She pointed, "but there were pink gorillas, and spiky apes hiding along the channels... And those things blend into this brown thicket _really_ well..."

"We just go forward and see how they cope with my speed," Doomguy said grimly. "In the open, I have overwhelming advantage... Unless it's viles or revenants."

"I don't think I saw any of those," Shantae said. "But I can't vouch for it. I saw bru— knights, and no less than two of those... really fat ones who launch avalanches of fire, and the brains on tinker-legs things. Also, some monster had fired a long, really straight stream of thunderballs at me..."

"The two last ones are one and the same," Doomguy said as he made a cautious step into the blood. "We call them ᚨᚱᚨᚻᚾᛟᛏᚱᛟᚾᛋ." ("spider-bots", she recognized with some difficulty). "Not too dangerous while you keep moving, but they can corral you with their streams, crossing these could be a problem. But we should get moving!"

"Right!" Shantae exclaimed eagerly, because he was absolutely right. She stepped into the blood, shuddering in revulsion at the familiar feeling of slimy bottom filtering between her toes and thick, tepid liquid lapping at her ankles. Then an idea hit her. "Let me scout ahead! With my danger sense I'd make the gun-toting ones show themselves!"

Doomguy wasn't looking happy at her proposal, but she was too pumped up now to stay still. Following the winding channel, she jogged forward, splashing liquid fouling up her silk pants. Doomguy was splashing close behind.

The walls of brown foliage erupted with angry hisses, fireballs started flying at her. Shantae ignored them for now, her speed enough to not even bother dodging. Then, an opening to the right - and her danger sense _prickled_ forcing her into a ragged rhythm of slowing and pushing faster. Bullets were zipping by, in front and behind her, raising a patter of dull impacts from the jungle wall to the left. It was time to pull back and let Doomguy deal with the monsters.

Shantae performed her trademark sliding dodge backwards... It didn't work! Being barefoot shouldn't have been a problem - this was how she trained it - but there was no traction. The channel bottom was too slippery and too sticky at the same time.

Having stopped, Shantae had to twist and contort to let bullets pass by. Then there was a barrage of fireballs, still coming from all around. And if that wasn't enough, her danger sense blared with a shaft of death coming from a steep hillock to the right, bluish-white light serving a visible confirmation a fraction of a second later.

Hearing Doomguy growl in frustration behind her, Shantae did the sensible thing and disengaged by running forward, following the channel in a sprint. Several times bullets and fireballs almost grazed her, their passage felt on her skin, but the channel eventually curved, the stream of thunderbolts from the - how did he name them? Spider-bot? - ceasing.

Sharp reports of gunfire from behind told her that Doomguy got to business. It was time to turn around and head back. Ignoring scarce fireballs still flying unexpectedly from the jungle - her danger sense wasn't working too well on such relatively slow things, so she had to watch out - the intrepid girl turned around only to meet face to face with a spiky ape jumping at her from the nearby wall of concealing brown.

She tried to d— She couldn't! And she forgot to reload her assault rifle!

Feeling a momentary stab of fear, Shantae whipped her hair with all her might, interrupting the pounce. The monster landed heavily in front of her and she didn't have time to whip again. It leaped, both arms upraised, vicious claws gleaming. She grabbed the thing by the wrists, stopping it. Its ugly, snarling rictus was inches from her face, fangs bared, eyes like burning coals of red-hot hatred.

Shuddering, the dancer girl gave ground, the bigger and heavier thing pushing her slowly backwards. And yet, she was the stronger. Baring her teeth in return, Shantae twisted her body, bringing her foot up between them. She then push-kicked, sending the brown thing flying a short distance to splash-land on its back. She then attacked it fiercely with her hair, not letting it get up and only pausing to dodge occasional fireball. Soon it was dead.

Shantae hurried back to Doomguy, finding him surrounded by corpses of spiky apes, zombies and pink gorillas, all partly exploded, their gore blending into the blood channel with sort of macabre aesthetics. The hero himself was dodging fireballs, shuffling sideways at impressive speed to avoid the stream of bluish-white thunderballs from that hill, returning fire with his cannon, the hill erupting with flying dirt and shredded plants but the actual enemy somehow surviving.

Shantae tried to help, firing her pistol into the jungle in the assumed direction of the concealed enemy, hoping maybe it would focus on her, but then Doomguy hit the spot, the hill erupting with flames and one mechanical leg tumbling through the air. "Get behind me!" the grim hero barked as he swapped the cannon for big shoulder pads with sort of small cannons stuck to them. "I don't trust whatever ee-ef-ef this thing has!"

Shantae hurried to oblige, curious. His shoulder-cannons began spewing surprisingly large churning fireballs, flying haphazardly in all directions, some rising, some spiraling chaotically. Fwoosh, fwoosh, left, right, left, right.

And then these smoky fireballs began swerving sharply, diving into the jungle, erupting with powerful explosions, each accompanied with a dying moan or bloody chunks flying, spiky ape legs and arms tumbling through the air. Doomguy was turning around slowly, Shantae scuttling to stay behind him, cowed by the unavoidability of the devastation being wrought.

Doomguy stopped shooting. The jungle, but half a minute ago full of well-hidden spiky apes, was eerily silent. Shantae shivered, feeling chilled despite the warm air, as she realized the true depth of menace hiding under such a simple word as "homing". There was nothing alive left in their vicinity, only flies buzzing, attracted to fresh meat. The black-and red clouds were moving silently overhead, above the jutting stone spires.

"This... thing," Doomguy patted the shoulder-cannon before swapping it for the black explodey grapeshooter, "I tore off a Revenant. Now you know what they can do... Please don't get caught in the open.

Shantae could only squeak in confirmation. It took her a minute to find her voice again. "C..come," she urged. "The blue key isn't far from here."

Following the blood channel - and blasting at occasional spiky apes lobbing surprise fireballs from their hiding spots - the two soon reached the arch through a rock massif ending in that lake of blood with a familiar hut on its shore. It went almost uneventfully, if you don't count the burned knight who had wandered there, and the _painfully_ familiar gatling zombie in red armor who emerged from behind the hut. Both got exploded by Doomguy in one rocket each, reduced to chunks and viscera decorating the oppressively drab brown shores.

"Here," Shantae led her still-faceless companion to the left side of the hut. Her curiosity was itching: what was his face like? But she wasn't going to bring the issue up. "The blue key is about this spot inside, but the room is so full of raw meat it couldn't be anything other than a trap. If only we could—"

And then the idea hit her, having been squirming just below the surface of her thoughts for a while. Scimitar dash! Against the force that could smash weak stone walls and knock treasure out of cliffs, this wooden wall would be nothing! Shantae ran purposefully towards the back corner. She only had... to...

Her steps faltered, Shantae found herself unable to continue. There would be... dead herself, her toned body shredded into a mutilated mess, her still, glassy eyes staring into the sky, maggots... No. She couldn't. She just couldn't.

"Uh, could you..." she turned to Doomguy hesitantly. "There may or may not be a... body behind this corner. You see, I died there. The auto-potion brought me back, back in the room where I first appeared, but I've never died as a full human before and this place, it... it changes how things work. So I just don't know..." She found herself almost pleading.

"What?" Doomguy stared at her incredulously. "Did I get it right: you have many lives and there may be your dead body over there?"

"Well... yes. I can die four more times without it sticking. But I'd like very much never have to. It was... painful."

"All right, I can see that," he said, back to his stoic self. "What do you want me to do with it? If there's a body?"

"Uh, could you, please, loot the boots?" Shantae asked sheepishly. "If they are there and salvageable, of course. I'd do it myself, but I cannot stomach... seeing."

"Boots?" he asked incredulously looking down at her bare feet caked with blood.

"Pirate boots," she clarified. "When combined with the pirate scimitar I can perform a dash that makes me pretty much invulnerable while I keep running. But when I was brought back, they were gone."

"All right," he grumbled, disappearing behind the corner. Shantae felt her stomach churn and clamped on her imagination, hard. She tried paying attention, watching out for sudden monsters.

A long minute later Doomguy returned, blood-caked boots in hand, to hold them out for her.

"Oh yeah!" Shantae felt a surge of optimism as she pulled the boots onto her incredibly messy feet. Supremely icky, but there was no helping it. She already resigned herself to getting so dirty and stinky that people would have pinch their noses shut around her. What with there not being clear water anywhere in sight.

Glad to get such a powerful trump back, she used the dash blurring back and forth across the lake, none of the splashing blood landing on her. "Now we can just break the wall and take the key from the outside, fooling the trap!"

"So... You got invulnerability at will?" Doomguy asked, sounding relieved and a tiny bit envious. "On top of _impressive_ speed that even exceeds mine?"

"Yeah, _but_ I have to have a whole second to get running fast enough," Shantae corrected him. "And there should be enough space to keep running. And I couldn't steer well. So this move is useless without a large, open space or a long, straight corridor. But! I... ugh... I can run through weaker monsters without even slowing. They just explode. I'm not sure about the beefier ones, we have to try and see."

"Still extremely useful," Doomguy said.

"Let me be your skirmisher," Shantae suggested. "I can dash ahead, poke the beehive, so to speak, foul any ambushes and make all the monsters after me. Then, either find a hiding spot or dash again, leading them back to you."

"A quite good plan," her stoic companion approved. "Considering we got no time to learn each other's fighting styles and communication signals, acting semi-independently and exploiting opportunities arising from each other's actions would be for the best."

Shantae beamed.

"Now," Doomguy continued, "I believe you proposed a method to get the blue key?"

"Yeah! Stand back, I got to curve just right between these bushes and the wall."

In the end, Shantae just tore a tunnel through the dense shrubbery, running in an arch into the jungle and out, to ram the hut at the right angle. The world shook, as always when colliding with something not quite penetrable. Shantae struggled to keep her footing, thrown violently backwards as usual.

The hut was now sporting a large, ragged hole in its wall. The blue skull-key just fell out landing on the ground.

Both heroes froze, listening and watching, but nothing else happened. Whatever the trap was, it seems they had fooled it.

The backtracking to the yellow key room was totally uneventful. Touching the blue skull grate with the blue skull key, Doomguy made it start retracting into the ceiling. The flaming skulls fell to his grapeshooter and Shantae's hair quickly.

There were ammo boxes as well! Letting Doomguy grab them all, Shantae walked out... Wait, the silence was broken by...

"Monsters are coming!" she shouted, tense. There were lots of growls and hisses and splashing steps coming from the swamp. "I'm going to test my dash!" she shouted, hearing Doomguy right behind her. Taking a running start, she pulled the scimitar out and shot forward with a powerful battle cry, the edges of her vision blurring. All too soon she was amid a crowd of monsters, fireballs splashing against her to no effect, pink gorillas rushing her only for their bodies to part in front of her like water, flying apart. Grazing a spider-bot she knocked one metallic leg off, speeding forward, unable to see anything behind her. A cacodemon dodged her, pulling upwards swiftly. A hell knight's burly body made her stumble, almost dropping out of the scimitar dash. It seems she tore his leg off, she wasn't sure, everything was blurring together so fast!

And then she was suddenly pushing against a torrent of fire, feeling like she was swimming against a current. It felt painfully hot, even through invulnerability. If she stops here... The thought made her skin crawl in horror, Shantae pushing forward desperately, feeling like she was going uphill... Then, suddenly, a quelch of collision, more springy than usual, and being thrown back, even more violently than usual... A terrified moment later she realized the flame was dissipating. The air around her was painfully hot, but that was all. Grabbing the pirate hat by reflex, she found herself floating slowly down a small distance away from that mound the two flame-throwing fatsos were stuck on. Now one lay burst, moaning in pain as its innards were spilling out, and the other one was rising to its feet, knocked down by his friend's body. Shantae gasped, but then all the fireballs aimed at her finally caught up, flying over her head and hitting the fat monster instead. It took offense, aiming somewhere behind it with a growl of "Rhanghemaaah!". Shantae paid attention to its second attack method: instead of a terrifying wall of flame, at large distances it was firing lots of haphazardly aimed fireballs. Huge, churning fireballs that turned lesser monsters into screaming torches in one hit and exploded into billowing clouds of fire when hitting scenery.

Very, very dangerous this one was, but possibly very useful, seemingly able to torch whole crowds of spiky apes and pink gorillas.

Gliding forward to land on the slope of the mound, Shantae flipped and ran down to gain momentum and go into the scimitar dash, just in time to meet approaching spiky apes head-on. She was going to speed back towards where she left Doomguy, but as she was plowing through the monsters in explosions of gore, something vibrantly blue caught the corner of her eye.

Shantae made two more passes to mop the monsters up, noticing they were backing away from her now, not completely mindless but still too stubborn to retreat. One of them dropped a strange item, resembling a flat lattice-like ward of glowing yellow wire, with a five-pointed star and a stylized demon maw and stuff. Mindful of the fatso on the mound, she pulled this thing into her inventory, then hurried into a small glade on one of the islands, almost completely concealed by bushes. Illuminated with several torches, there was yet another blue sphere with a face floating inside.

Oh yeah!

Now having two, Shantae hurried back to Doomguy, dodging huge churning balls of fiery death before dashing away. She had to loop around and follow the trail of bodies to find him. Ironically, next to the mound with now two dead fatsos. Lesson learned: her companion could move fast!

"Come," she beckoned him. "I'll lead you to the yellow door."

She actually had him wait, climbing onto the rock massif to check the twisting gorge and the road from above. Both seemed deserted, only dead bodies laying unmoving. Soon Doomguy was on the glade, Shantae gliding down to land next to him standing over that other guy in green armor.

"I f only I could—" she began.

"Hush," he interrupted her quietly. "He was reckless and paid for it." He touched something small to the dead man's armor, causing a tiny beep. "There was nothing you could do to shield him from his own stupidity. Rather, he would have gotten you killed as well."

"Uh..." That was incredibly rude to say about someone deceased... but also true. She grew sure in her impression of Doomguy being brutally honest. "What are you doing?"

"I collected his dog marks. So, this is the door, huh?" He walked to the building, avoiding a suspiciously discolored patch of the ground.

"Dog... marks?" she asked, confused.

"His name, rank, confirmation for time and place of his death documented by his armor," Doomguy explained touching the door framed by yellow panels with the yellow skull. The door retracted up into the wall with a loud creak. "Well, isn't this nice and inviting."

Shantae peered inside. The entire interior of the gray building was one large hall, with two rows of round columns framing the central passage leading to a similar door on the other side. There were rows of open coffins taking up most of the space along the side walls.

"There are two knights and two spider-bots behind that door," she warned pointing at the far end of the hall.

"I'm more concerned with what surprises the hall itself hides," Doomguy replied. There were candles burning in niches in the columns, adorned with long messy beards of dripping wax, adding to the spooky graveyard atmosphere. "I wonder..." He sneaked to the nearest coffin. "But of course." He then turned to Shantae. "Be a dear, drop a grenade into the hole in that other coffin, will you?" He produced a grenade.

"Uh, sure," she replied sneaking to the nearest coffin on the other side. The coffin itself turned to be a fake without a bottom, just an oblong shape of six boards on the stone floor, but there was a hole in the floor inside it. Shrugging, Shantae took a grenade out, pulled the pin, then dropped the implement of death and destruction into the hole. And then she performed her trademark sliding dodge twice in a row, to huddle down in the corner.

Doomguy, presumably, did likewise because, with two almost simultaneous booms, geysers of blood and viscera erupted from the coffins, to rain down or stick to the ceiling, hang there for a few seconds and only then fall down with squelches.

"Aha," Doomguy said with satisfaction and she imagined a bloodthirsty grin on his face. "Now to check the rest of these."

"I got a better idea," Shantae said. "Let me dash to the far wall, stop there and dash back. Even if all these coffins have monsters pop out of them, they have to regain their bearings, right? I mean, you can't just immediately aim if you can't see what's out there. And that will give me enough delay to begin another dash!"

Doomguy agreed - grudgingly, as if she wasn't the one with four spare lives here!

Shantae walked out to a have space for a running start, Doomguy following her to stand next to the door - a perfect ambush for anyone rushing out. She pulled the scimitar out and dashed into the hall, hearing some growls around her but focused on stopping short of the other door to avoid stunning herself. With just enough momentum to absorb with one outstretched leg and push, bouncing back, twirling to face the exit, already crouching low...

The sight caught by the corners of her eyes made Shantae's blood turn cold. She was surrounded by gatling zombies in red armor, lots of them, barrels already pointing at her, spinning up!

With a weeping cry of terror, she pushed and pushed, but couldn't move, her feet slipping on the stone floor, suspended like she was swimming through molasses, memories of dying painfully flashing through her mind... Make it stop...

And then she was moving fast enough to dash, and the edges of her vision blurred signaling invincibility, just in time as bullets started whipping her body from all sides like a vicious hailstorm, painful and biting but at least giving her extra speed.

Stampeding through a group of pink gorillas almost without noticing them, Shantae tore out of the hall like a bat out of hell, zipping across the glade, tearing through shrubbery and only stopping when she collided with a rock wall.

When she gathered her wits and trudged back, Doomguy was dueling the last of these deadly zombies, competing in who aims and hits faster by popping from behind the doorframe with his cannon. He was tsking at his misses, rockets exploding against the far wall uselessly.

Her knees suddenly shaky, Shantae reminded herself that fears had to be faced lest they stew and linger and poison your resolve. Pulling back a bit, she took a running start with a shout, going into the scimitar dash, through the doors and at the last zombie - he was in the far right corner - speeding against the stinging hailstorm of bullets...

Something hit her in the small of her back like a sledgehammer, making her go so fast everything blurred. The zombie grew close instantly, then a stunning impact, blood and sparks in her eyes, floor and ceiling flipping rapidly!

A second later Shantae regained her bearings, finding herself tumbling through the air shapely posterior over teakettle. Twisting in mid-air - ouch, but her back hurt! - she righted herself before touching down in the row of coffins, stumbling, tumbling again and finally coming to a stop by landing in one on her back.

"Shantae!" Doomguy shouted, his footsteps approaching rapidly.

"I'm fine!" she croaked, laying in a coffin and blinking at the dimly lit ceiling. Had she been superstitious... As it was, she chuckled, finding her position hilarious. Well, macabre kind of hilarious. "Owie. What hit me?"

Doomguy was leaning over the edge, his posture conveying concern and reproach.

"Oh!" She got it, face-palming. "Oh, that was so stupid of me...! Rushing in without warning you... I'm sorry!" She dragged herself to her feet with a groan. The wall in that corner was splattered red, the gatling twisted into a pretzel being the biggest chunk remaining of the zombie. "Well, at least your rocket turned me into a deadly projectile. We may remember this as a fighting technique for future reference, powers combined and all that." She rubbed her back and winced. "A dangerous, forbidden technique never to be used again."

"You have severe bruising there," he warned with a resigned sigh.

"I certainly feel it," Shantae agreed, bending this way and that, to test her flexibility. "Ow. No, this won't do. But I don't want spending a healing potion!" She really didn't. Who knew how long this adventure would take, they had to finish it with only the six, or so, doses she had remaining. Then she wanted to slap herself for forgetting important things again. "Here," she produced one of the doctor boxes, holding it out for her companion. "Could you use this to make my back better? I can't read any labels, the only thing I recognize in there is the gauze."

"And you were going to tell me that you had it... when?" he asked flatly as he browsed the tiny vials and inserted one into some fiddly thing. "Turn your back to me."

"I... Uh..." She obliged. "I'm too used to adventuring alone. Let's recount what I have before we move... Ouch."

"I agree." Doomguy began poking her bruise with that fiddly thing causing quiet clicks accompanied with stinging sensations that soon changed to numbness and feeling of warmth. The pain was receding.

"What is that thing?" Shantae asked, feeling curious. She tried bending again and found herself able to move without restrictions. The small of her back was feeling hot, almost burning. "Reminds me the times when our doctor poked me with that big scary needle."

"It's a jet injector," Doomguy explained replacing the healing implement in the box. "Basically, it fires medicine at such speeds that liquid itself becomes a needle, penetrating into your skin or even muscle, however high you set the power."

"Amazing tinker-tech!" Shantae approved wholeheartedly. "Thanks to it, I'm ready for action!" She made towards the still closed door, then stopped herself. "Uh, sorry. So, I got four more such boxes, then six or so gulps of healing potion..."

"Healing potion?"

"Well, you drink it and your wounds vanish," she explained. "Depending on how badly you are hurt, it takes up to three gulps to return to full health. So, um... say, we have enough to heal a deadly wound two times. Next, the auto-potions." She took one winged vial out staring at it. "This thing could heal _any_ wounds, but it can't be divided. You open it, you may very well drink it all. Also, these are my spare lives, so to speak." She suddenly had an idea. "Here! Take one, you should have it in case—"

"I refuse," Doomguy said flatly. "You... Aren't you our skirmisher? You need them more."

"But... All right, but, really, why?" She disliked the idea of him not having such a sorta-emergency-miracle.

"It could lull me into complacency," he explained reluctantly. "I can't afford that... So, you got anything else useful?"

"Hmm..." Shantae pulled the assault rifle out. "Let's take care of the weapons first. I only realized I forgot to reload this thing when a spiky ape was descending on me with claws raised." She fumbled a bit, replacing an empty ammo box with a full one. "Here, my `ack, they jumped me` life-saver is in order. Now, the... grapeshooter?" She pulled out the massive black musket. "I... I think I should leave it. This one requires knowing how to handle it, and I only got four charges." She pulled the handle four times, then put the weapon down and held the red cylinders out to Doomguy. "I think I'd be better off having a spare room in my inventory, in case something unusual pops up. Never miss an opportunity and all that."

"All right." he took the ammo making it vanish.

"My last weapon that needs ammo is the cannon."

"Bazooka," Doomguy corrected.

"Uh, buh... bazooka," she repeated. Why do people keep inventing _weird_ names for things? "I have three full drums, including the one loaded, and one with one rocket left. That's 19 rockets. Next, the items. Oh, and I have five grenades left! So, items. My last three scrolls of Bubble I handed to you to hold onto because, honestly, I'm not sure that spell is up to stopping lots of bullets or fireballs so devastating, and finding out it doesn't would probably end in me dying horribly. Then, two bento boxes and three lobster tails... Ugh, I'm hungry but this hell stinks so much I feel sick even thinking of eating."

"You could make wicks out of gauze," Doomguy offered, "and stick them up your nose. If you dab them in disinfectant, its sharp smell would drown the local... odors and may even knock your sense of smell out."

"That's great!" Shantae was overjoyed. "Show me which one is it and let's have lunch!"

They then moved to a small side room with an obvious exit button - who saw one iron skull ornament built into a wall, saw them all - because it had stone slabs that could serve as a table. An incredibly messy table crusted with wax from drippy candles, but still.

Doomguy staunchly refused sharing lunch with her, from saying he wasn't hungry to outright stating he was fasting to keep his focus. The last one sounded far-fetched but she relented and stopped pestering him. Who knows what horrors did he see in that invaded town of theirs? Maybe he couldn't eat now until he defeats the ultimate evil. What a depressing thought.

The smell of disinfectant was eye-watering but it kept the hellish stench at bay! Only now realizing how hungry she was, Shantae wolfed both bento boxes down. Burp. Ow. That was... too hasty, she was feeling stuffed now, her stomach aching. Well, at least she had one more free space in her inventory now.

She made to the button, but Doomguy stopped her:

"Are you _sure_ you aren't forgetting something else?"

Shantae hummed, going through list in her head. She then gasped in realization. "You're right! I was collecting all these but forgot to ask you what they do!" She then deposited all the local items she have collected on one of the "tables" so that no one activates them by accident.

Doomguy stared at the small pile of artifacts, unmoving. She got an impression, for some reason, that his eye should be twitching now.

Two blue spheres with faces floating inside, one eye-like red and blue sphere and one creepy lattice-like ward were hovering there, flashing softly like they were staring back at him.

He then slumped with a sigh. "But of course, you forgot about your most invaluable ability."

"Huh?" Shantae said, puzzled. "Invaluable? But they are just touch-activated magic items, I simply... don't... Oh! Ooooh! You can't put things into your inventory without touching them, aren't you...? So you would be... forced to use these items where you find them, or leave...? Oh, I'm so sorry! That would be mightily inconvenient! Let me be your magic item bearer!"

"Thank you," Doomguy replied tiredly. "And yes, tactical value of being able to carry them is... invaluable. The blue soul spheres spheres there," he pointed, careful to stay away from the items, "heal any wounds instantly, bringing you to full health and giving you a serious boost of energy if your wounds weren't severe. The red-and-blue orb looking like an eye is invisibility sphere, it makes you invisible for a while. They sometimes fall out of specters as you kill them."

"You mean, _invisible_ pink gorillas?" Shantae said, shuddering. "Are they..." She gulped. "..common?"

"They're rare, I'd say," Doomguy replied. "You usually encounter small packs of them in dark and narrow places." Seeing Shantae pale - she almost missed his next words! Because dark! And narrow! And then _they_ come! - he elaborated: "They aren't that stealthy because first, they snarl and growl, too stupid to keep silent, and second, their eyes glow, making their invisibility moot when they face you. So, pay attention to sounds, keep your eyes peeled and they aren't that more dangerous than common pinkies."

"Whew! That's a relief!" Shantae felt a mountain of worries fall from her shoulders. "And what does this creepy wiry thing do?"

"It's a demon strength rune. Can fall out of any enemy you kill, gives your barehanded strikes unnatural strength. You can tear weaker demons apart like they were cardboard. Pinkies and cacos you need to hit more than once and beefier demons could be dangerous because they can take several hits and retaliate before you could rip and tear them. But this thing doesn't just increase your strength, it only makes your interaction with other living things disproportionately brutal. And it has a severe side effect, making you extremely angry. You literally see red."

"Hmm, so it's like super monster milk turned up to eleven, then," Shantae mused replacing the artifacts in her inventory. "The milk makes you mildly angry," she explained, "and increases potency of your strikes twofold... Or even less, it's not like I got a strike-o-meter to compare them precisely."

This time it was Doomguy who made towards the button and it was Shantae's turn to stop him: "Wait, let me draw them in!"

And so it went, almost too easy. Shantae jumped out, shot all four enemies with the pirate pistol making them angry at her, then ran back to the first door and kept shooting them in the face while dodging their fire as Doomguy standing next to the far door was shooting them in the back. Two knights and two spider-bots went down quickly, the last one getting torn off its tinker platform to crawl around like a snail, moaning pitifully. Doomguy punted the gray brain-like thing into the jungle where it landed on one of the innumerable sharp stakes with a wet splorch.

Shantae made a face, but internally she was wondering if Rotty would find the idea of eating such things fascinating. They weren't really brains, weren't they?

"Here ends the land I scouted," Shantae said while they were waiting for the huge iron pillars barring the dark tunnel passage to retract into the ground. The towering crag this tunnel was passing through was blocking any view ahead. "I know there is another fortress up ahead, you could only see an edge of it from that other rock wall. I think..." She glanced back to the gray building they had so much adventures in. "Wait, I think it is wider than the hall!"

Running back to the building, she confirmed that yes, there was quite a space unaccounted for. The iron face ornament on the wall opposite the button room was looking suspiciously like a door, placed in a big sunken square. But neither pushing nor shooting it produced any results and hasty search for a hidden switch turned up nothing.

The two heroes had to leave this mysterious treasure-room unmolested, hurrying forward, toward parts unknown.

(シーンブレイク)

 **A/N 1:** You may have noticed that Shantae hears Doomguy's words sliiiightly differently from what he really says in English: "molten sulfur" instead of "brimstone", "spider-bot" instead of "arachnotron" and so on.

Also, if you wondered, I use transliteration to Elder Futhark for Doomguy's words Shantae doesn't recognize, and transliteration to Mkhedruli for Shantae's words Doomguy doesn't recognize.

 **A/N 2:** Can you use this fic as a walkthrough for maps 21 and 22 of Extermination Day? The short answer: don't. Shantae uses shortcuts that don't exist in the game while the terrain I describe may or may not match actual map layouts.

(シーンブレイク)


	7. Quiet Too quiet

**Too Nice for Such Brutality**  
by Cheb

Shantae was created by and belongs to Matt Bozon and WayForward. DooM II was created by id software and belongs to Bethesda. Brutal DooM mod is being created by Sergeant Mark IV

 **Chapter 7,  
Quiet. Too quiet.**

When the tunnel turned out to be utterly dark, Shantae was glad to learn that Doomguy's helmet had a lantern in it. The long, winding tunnel finally ended, the two unlikely companions stepping out under the light of a familiar crimson-and-black sky. There was a stocky, massive fort of gray stone in front of them... And they didn't have time to take a look because just then the gate was opening, releasing a monstrosity she had not seen before. It was some sort of centaur, with the upper body of a brown brute on the body of... some sort of lion?

And it was overwhelmingly huge, easily twice the height of barons and knights.

A sudden boss fight! The stab of fear she felt had transformed, as always, into a wave of scalding ice flooding her veins, giving her energy of desperation.

" _Dodge!_ " Doomguy shouted when familiar green fire lit in the monster's upraised hand. And then he tumbled, rolling away from the line of fire in a display of acrobatics.

Shantae slid back and sideways, and again, and then the green fireball was flying and gosh, was it huge, its radiant heat washing over her skin. She let it pass harmlessl—

BOOM.

There was earth and pebbles raining down, smoke and stars swimming in her vision, her ears ringing. Shantae stumbled backwards past the edge of the left tower when her danger sense screamed a certain death incoming! Sliding forward, closer to the boss, she heard bullets whisper through the air, washing her back with air pressure and gnawing loudly at the cliff face to the right of her. She realized she and Doomguy were both trapped on a relatively small square between the tunnel exit - sheer rock wall included - and the fort entrance - when her partner opened on the monster with his... zooka.

Rockets exploding deafeningly close, barely far enough to not do the dancer girl in, only seemed to made the monster mad! It let fly another green fireball, then again, Doomguy rolling and tumbling to avoid them. Both exploded with great power, sounding boomier than even the rockets!

Fighting this thing in this confined space was suicide. On one side, a wall of bullets. On the other side, a ravine of sorts. The only options were into the fort or into the tunnel.

Shantae ran into the tunnel, leaving the sounds of battle behind her, hoping that Doomguy would be all right. Then she had enough space for a running start and scimitar-dashed back at the enemy, reaching the lion-brute centaur in a blink of an eye to ram one of its forelegs.

Both stumbled back, unbalanced for a fraction of a second. Then the beast reared, focusing its attention on the girl in light blue, aiming to crush her under its clawed paws.

Shantae dodged sliding back as hard as she could, with a twirl on one foot. The black claws crushed bare rock, missing her wide. Seeing Doomguy finish reloading his weapon, she slid backwards again, then turned to run away, zig-zagging as the monster looked like it was going to attack her with fireballs from distance.

She only dodged one ball of pale green death when rockets began slamming into the monster. Feeling no follow up attacks aimed at her, Shantae glanced back in time to see the enemy collapsing, bruised and bloodied, crimson blood streaming from its open maw. A belated explosion deeper in the tunnel hammered her ears with its boom wave.

"Wh..what sort of monster was it?" she asked Doomguy as she walked out of the tunnel, a bit out of breath. "Are they common?"

"A ᛒᛖᚦᛚᛖᚷᛟᚱ," he grumbled. Then repeated slowly, seeing her incomprehension: "Beph-le-gor. They are exceedingly rare, you are more likely to encounter a ᚲᛁᛒᛖᚱᛞᛖᛗᛟᚾ."

He then moved towards the corner of the left tower, to peek beyond it cautiously. He jerked back but a second later, a hail of bullets chipping and gnawing at the corner.

"Figures," he grumbled. "Those _eich-em-gees_ at the foothill castle weren't their last. Just how deep was the collaboration running?"

"Uhh..." Shantae mumbled awkwardly.

"They got heavy machinegun turrets," Doomguy said, swapping his bazooka for a shorter cylindrical weapon, with sort of glowing glass windows running along its sides and top, tiny blue lightning bolts churning inside. "I'll go snipe them down." He pointed to one of the two lift platforms framing the gate room inside the tower. "Could you distract them? Carefully."

"All right," Shantae agreed easily. "Just how... Oh! You'll hear it!" She waited for him to ride the platform to the top - there were several meaty impacts, crunches and zombie moans of pain - before running outside and poking her head around the corner. There was a moat separating this gate tower from a much larger fort standing— Her danger sense screamed incoming death!

Jerking back sharply - she haven't even seen who shot at her - Shantae was peppered with chipped stone as hail of bullets gnawed at the corner. Then there was sort of sharp "pew" and the bullets ceased.

Shantae peered around the corner again. This time there was no sense of danger. She saw a wooden platform attached to the opposing wall of gray stone, supported by iron chains. It, and the wall behind it, were splattered with blood, a slight smoke rising above it. There was a weapon on a peg on the platform, kind of those gatlings Ammo Baron's men used. But muuuch deadlier. How did her companion call them? Heavy machin-o-guns?

She walked cautiously out, surveying the width of the main fort. It was stocky and inelegant, massive, angular corner towers connected by a stretch of wall of the same height, spiky apes behind grated windows lobbing fireballs at her. She just walked forward, unconcerned, approaching the massive stone bridge connecting the small fort to the main fort entrance, when her danger sense suddenly screamed again! She saw a duo of gatling zombies in red armor on a balcony overhanging the gate, but it was too late! Unable to dodge backwards - she'd just run right into the fireballs - she slid forward, and again, and again, as the zombies followed her with their aim. Bullets humming through the air chillingly close, pattering on the ground behind her, she had no choice but to fall into the moat!

Thankfully, blood there proved shallow enough to avoid flooding the boots. Hidden safely in the moat - a small gorge, really - Shantae got a good look at a blue spiral that flashed between the tower of the small fort where Doomguy was and the balcony. This second sharp "pew" was accompanied by bits and pieces flying, some even landing in the moat. So, that weapon was at least as strong as the bazooka. Also, ew. However necessary, exploding your enemies was still gross.

Shantae glanced at a human eye floating in the blood lapping at her boots. Right. She had a way home to find and evil to stop.

She began searching for a way to climb out of this blood-filled ravine without having to take the boots off. Because going barefoot through blood and gore was a whole special kind of gross and wrong.

Doomguy was going to enter the fort — he found a lever that raised the giant grate barring its gate — but Shantae offered to scout ahead first. Scaling the wall was relatively easy, even as her arms were beginning to burn with all the exertion. She was used to jumping around, rarely using her arms for anything but blocking enemy attacks.

She found the fort shaped more or less like a horse-shoe, with only a thin balcony and a giant grate — now raised — separating its inner yard from a bridge connecting to the crag looming ahead. Basically, Doomguy could enter the yard by simply going around the fort because the bridge wasn't separated from the narrow strip of land surrounding the walls.

There were a couple moments when zombies in the yard opened fire on her, but that was just the routine of exploring a dungeon. Dungeons are _never_ empty of hostile creatures.

She shouted her directions to Doomguy below. Him going around the fort could be easily heard as some monsters obviously tried to stop him, for their own peril. When he entered the yard, Shantae began popping above the roof edge, shooting the zombies below then disappearing again. There were lots of bullets chewing at the stone parapet, some of the zombies were those gatling-toting ones in red. She was so scared of them she had to exert an effort of will to keep doing her distraction.

Thankfully, soon the shooting ceased. Shantae peered over the edge. There were only dead bodies and Doomguy, standing near the blood fountain in the center and reloading his weapon. She jumped down into the yard joining him.

Surveying the surrounding landscape led both the companions to conclusion that they should head into the opening in the bluff across the bridge. There was a small problem, though: a giant iron grate barring the way. Shantae squeezed between the bars easily, ascended short flight of stairs into a hall cut into solid rock... and was stopped by a locked door. Requiring a red skull key, judging by the glaringly obvious ornaments framing it. There was no lever nor button to lower the grate either.

The dancer girl in pirate boots returned to the bridge. Frustrated, she eyed the crag. It was stretching up, and up, and up, impossibly tall, imposing and towering, its top indistinct in the black-and-crimson murk. Her arms and feet ached from the thought alone. No way.

Resigned that there was no avoiding exploring the fort, the two returned into the yard, going up the stairs to the twin gates leading inside. A small lever in a niche between them made them rise. Beyond, there was just a cavernous entrance hall, split into two halves on slightly different levels, separated by a thick wall and connected by stairs along the side walls so that the gates leading into the yard weren't visible from the main gate.

There was nothing and no one there, only barren cobblestone floor, unadorned gray stone walls and a lot of those metal barrels full of glowy green liquid stashed near the main gate, almost blocking it.

Doomguy decided to explore the right wing — if one looked with their back to the main gate. The interior was a drab twisting hallway with doors here and there. Doomguy took the point. Some doors were locked. Some revealed small, sparsely decorated rooms, empty or with a few zombies whom the stoic hero always smeared across the walls, often before they even knew what hit them. She would never be able to hear words "paint red" without flinching, she was sure.

At least they got a yellow skull key for their efforts, it was stuffed into a dresser in one of the rooms.

An iron satyr face spitting fireballs at regular intervals was something Shantae was familiar with, even if it differed a little from the snake heads of her home land that spit fireballs in a more elaborate rhythm of one-pause-three-pause.

Doomguy couldn't just hop over the fiery projectiles as she did absent-mindedly. He had to barge through a nearest door, to the detriment of zombies dwelling in that room.

Shantae tried another door, only to meet face-to-face with a hell knight who roared his challenge. She almost had a heart attack! Yelping, she began backing away, mindful of fireballs. The brute followed her. Then he was shot dead by Doomguy leaning out of his room.

Eventually they reached the hallway end.

"It's a trap," Shantae stated the obvious as they stood side by side eyeing a spacious room with a rather high ceiling, its entire front side a single large opening. There were two big, black rectangular things with a glowing orange strip sitting enticingly in a niche in the far wall.

"It is," Doomguy agreed. "And I have a bad feeling about this one. Let's go."

There was a narrow curved staircase opposite the room, leading up.

"Wait," she stopped him. "Do you need these... boxy things?" She peered at irregularities in the ceiling. Because if her hunch was right...

"That's how bulk ammo for my best guns looks like," her companion grumbled, frustration seeping into his voice. "Which I'm almost out of, after that— No, stop!"

Shantae had already strolled into the trap, her steps light. The rusty creak followed by a mighty slam still made her flinch: she was high-strung, apprehensive of this trap springing unexpected surprises on her as she sprung it. She took a quick look around. A grate of metal bars, thick like tree trunks, now blocking the entrance? Check. The ceiling descending rather rapidly? Check. Also, it had sprouted rusty blades caked with dried blood. Ew.

Whisking the boxy things quickly into her inventory, Shantae jumped to the grate. Where she proceeded to slip between the bars, almost effortlessly. She was proud of how flexible her body was! The hardest part was getting her ears through without scraping them badly. Because head, sadly, doesn't compress. But she managed, wriggling it around carefully, just before the descending ceiling almost clipped her nose.

Scrape-CRASH!

And then the ceiling was ascending, the bars following it as the trap re-armed itself.

"Here," She beamed presenting Doomguy with her catch.

He looked like he was going to berate her for recklessness. Then he just sighed and touched the boxes with his foot disappearing them into his own inventory.

The curved stairway ended in a locked door requiring a blue key. The heroes had to backtrack. A flight of stairs led up to the corner tower, connected by a long gallery to the second tower on the other side of the fort. Hi, pink gorillas, meet Doomguy. Bye, pink gorillas.

There were barred windows in the outside wall, dead spiky apes lying below them. When did her companion manage to shoot them? The middle part of the gallery was open, forming that balcony above the main gate, painted with gatling zombie innards.

Then, another door. It lifted opened a crack then jammed. There was no getting into the left tower this way.

Shantae offered to sneak along the walls but there was an elevator platform, taking up almost the entire width of the hallway, and Doomguy wanted to check where it went. He pushed a button, the floor lowered revealing an empty hall with long tables full of tankards and roasted meat, chairs lining them haphazardly.

Shantae felt a pleasant, inviting smell of barbecue. It was so strong it was even overpowering the everpresent stench. She then noticed a roaring fireplace with mutilated human bodies roasting inside. She had to fight a powerful bout of nausea.

"Wait, I hear voices from there," Doomguy whispered urgently, pointing at the door that led, probably, into the entrance hall.

Shantae nodded, still ill at ease, and checked the other door on her own initiative. She only found a short hallway running in parallel to he dining hall, with empty shelves running along its entire length. She then joined Doomguy in peering into the entrance hall.

Which wasn't empty anymore, there were many zombies in black armor busy dragging those barrels of glowy green liquid towards the dining hall. Seeing the hero and his sorta-squire through the opening door, they scrambled for their weapons dropping the barrels, which splashed and sloshed. One even fell to its side spilling its contents onto the bumpy cobblestone floor.

Doomguy, against Shantae's expectations, backpedaled back into the dining hall rather than engaging the unexpecting enemies. She added two and two rather quickly:

"Are those barrels dangerous?"

"Quite," her stoic companion affirmed. "They explode rather violently when hit. With _larger_ blast radius than the rockets."

"Oh!"

"Zombies never seem to mind that danger," he added. "Usually I let them blow themselves up, even provoke them into doing so, but there are too many barrels in there for my comfort."

Shantae agreed that bringing the fort down on their heads wasn't a risk worth taking. So they played it safe, waiting for the zombies to shamble through the door.

They weren't that different from the wild zombies of Sequin Land, she decided after the fourth one fell. They were drawn to their adversary like moths to the flame, never regrouping or trying any tricks. Their only power was in their deadly firearms and in their numbers. One well-placed, alert Doomguy was enough to spell doom for them all.

Tiptoeing between ruined, bleeding corpses — zombies back home didn't bleed, but this Hell had its own reality with its rather gruesome rules — Shantae checked that there was no one provisionally alive in the hall.

"Hmm," she hummed, staring curiously at the glowing green puddle on the floor. Even through the ever-present stench it smelled weird, bitter and charged, like aftereffects of her lightning spells. "What _is_ this stuff?"

"Honestly? I don't know," Doomguy admitted. "Officially it's nukage. But I call bullshit. Not only isn't it radioactive enough, everyone around would drop dead like door-nails after just one barrel exploding if that was the case. It's tied to nuclear power plants, though. Half the facility on Mars was flooded with this shit. What I can tell, it's harmful to us, humans. So don't go stepping, much less falling into it. Not as harmful as running across molten lava, but it drains you making you feel like shit."

"Oh." She backed away from the unassuming pool. The glow was even pretty, to be honest. "Why do they have so much of it then?"

Doomguy shrugged. "By some reason demons absolutely love this shit and hoard those barrels wherever they can, without regards to danger. They even managed to turn a whole river back home into it, I don't know, how, but it had this green shit flowing instead of water."

At closer inspection it turned out that one of the zombies had dropped a red skull key! Now they only had to find a way to lower that giant grate before they could move further.

Exploring continued. That corridor behind the dining hall led to a prison, all its stinky cells empty, their doors opened. There was a yellow key door across the prison, incongruously open, leading into a small room with a... warp platform. Shantae shivered.

Doomguy agreeing that braving an unknown warp location wasn't in their best interest right now. They turned back and rode the lift to the outer gallery. Where Shantae used the scimitar dash to ram the jammed door making it unstuck.

The tower was empty. The wooden platform with the weapon on a peg — the so called "eich-em-gee" — was accessible, if splattered with zombie. Doomguy even entertained the idea of taking it with him... But alas, it proved too heavy to put into his inventory.

From the tower, a balcony ran along the length of the fort towards the crag they had to climb, providing a good view of the drab landscape to their left. The brown jungle was beginning right on the other side of the ravine-like moat, overgrown hills stretching into distance between crags towering in the red haze.

There were no monsters in sight, this emptiness was starting to make Shantae a bit unnerved.

"I think we are early," Doomguy said when they stopped in front of yet another blue skull door. "We caught them flat-footed, with only a skeleton crew manning this fort."

"Uh, I think you lost me here," Shantae complained, her eyes drawn to the right, at a _large_ cache of goodies seen through a barred window. "I don't think there were any cacklers around."

"What's a cack— Uh, right, that's pretty obvious. I meant this fort is staffed by a minimum crew, enough to keep it in order but not much else," Doomguy explained. "That's what we call a 'skeleton crew'."

"Oh! I see," Shantae replied, almost not listening. The treasure room had a door lined with yellow. "I believe we have a yellow key?"

"This one requires a yellow _key card_ ," the man in green corrected her grumpily. "While our key is a skull. It's useless here, believe me."

"In that case!" she proclaimed, rising up to the challenge of this arrogant treasure room. She walked to the window, placed her face against the grate and tried pushing her head through. The rusty bars of spiraling iron objected. Owie.

But she persisted. Treasure sitting in plain sight was an offense to any self-respecting relic hunter! So what if she had to twist take her earrings off prying the gold rongs open, then push so hard that her pointy ears and the sides of her head felt raw and bruised?

Wriggling the rest of the way in was a piece of cake after her head was through.

She heard Doomguy sighing.

Now, there were lots of ammunition on the shelves. She sucked the magazines into her inventory stacking them neatly with the assault rifle where they belonged. Then, rows and rows of those small red cylinders, ammo for the grapeshooter. Which she currently did not have, so she had to find a free mental space for it.

The inventory was a strange thing, full of illogical limitations. The things habitual, like her clothing, she could store with no limits. The things that had a purpose, like quest items — or pirate gear, thankfully — without limit as well. But supplies, she had trouble storing them at first, until one traveler taught her a meditation technique of building an imaginary grid and keeping items in its cells. She trained it year after year — because while boring it was mightily useful — so she was up to a four by three grid now. Let's see... six doses of healing potion, four auto-potions, assault rifle with eleven magazines, bazoooka with four drums. Empty, thirty two grapeshooter charges, one sushi, empty. One invisibility sphere, two soul spheres, one demon strength rune, four med-kits.

Yep, she was down to two free positions again and there was yet un-picked treasure. Namely, seven glowy blue cuirasses, hilariously too big for her lithe dancer form.

"Are these—" she began, pointing at them, when she had an embarrassing mishap.

She touched one of the cuirasses.

There was a blue flash, she yelped... And stared at her bracer.

Because it was dark blue instead of gold!

"This is blue armor power-up," Doomguy explained patiently. "It makes your armor stronger, nigh impenetrable. Lasts until enemy blows wear it down. The more armor you have, the better it lasts. In your case..."

"I wasted it," Shantae said sullenly, looking down at her clothing, now light blue where it had been red. Even the pirate boots were dark blue. "So what if I can probably block a blow from a baron now? It'd send me flying anyway." She put the six remaining cuirass-shaped artifacts into her inventory. Down to one free slot now.

Crawling out was no less painful.

"Say," she said nursing her tender, throbbing ears, "we got the red skull key for that door across the bridge and we got _two_ blue doors leading to that balcony overhanging the bridge entrance. I have a hunch that that's where a lever lowering that huge grate is. How about I climb to that balcony while you head to the bridge now? I bet we can skip searching for the blue skull."

Doomguy reluctantly agreed. The near lack of monsters was unnerving him as well.

Shantae quickly climbed up the wall beside the blue door, jogged across the almost flat stone roof and jumped down on the balcony.

A chorus of angry hisses made her start. Spiky apes from the left, in the corridor she just merrily skipped above!

Cringing inside at the necessity, Shantae pulled the scimitar out running at the brown beasts with a battle cry. Their fireballs splashed harmlessly against her invulnerability, then the monsters themselves splashed and splattered against the walls. She dropped out of the dash, skidding to a stop. There were no survivors. She went back to the balcony, gore squelching underfoot. What a mess.

A lever was there, just as she predicted. The giant grate went down and she jumped down onto the bridge to wait for Doomguy.

Hmm, what was taking him so long?

Black-and-crimson clouds flowing above the towering crag had sort of savage beauty to them. If only the stench of blood from the moat wasn't so distracting. Overall, this place wasn't that much worse than the Mud Bog Island, which was also dreary, dirty and stinky and full of strong monsters.

..wait, what was that sound?

The red skull door was opening, only the bottom of it visible through the opening in the crag. Shantae tensed. The door revealed a pair of immense hooves, one brown of demonic flesh, another shiny metal, attached to a mechanical leg.

No, please, no.

The hooves began descending the stairs with caution, the steps too small for them. Gradually revealing immense legs, one a metallic contraption beneath the backwards-facing joint.

Nooo.

Shantae found herself backing away involuntarily, her body growing numb and weak.

The immense demon walked beneath a decorative gate. Stopped to look around imperiously. Then it stepped onto the bridge, towering, all bulging rock-hard muscle and thick shiny metal, the eyes on its flat, wide head glowing baleful red.

Intellectually, Shantae knew this was but a little brother of That Boss. It was brown, not red, it only had one mechanical leg, and only one of its arms was replaced with a bulky, boxy cannon, and that cannon was only the size of a bull, not the size of a house.

But try telling that to the liquid terror that was coursing through her veins.

The Boss _looked_ at her. Then it let out a terrifying roar, a screeching cry of primal hatred, the hulk shaking with it.

Shantae only managed not to faint because of special training, repeating the mantra "a fainted hero is a dead hero" from the very beginning of her relic hunter career when she turned twelve and could finally beat weak monsters on her own as she began exploring dungeons worrying her Uncle sick.

This monster wasn't something she could hope to beat. No way, never.

But standing still never got anyone anywhere. Except early grave, maybe.

Trembling in fear, she pulled out her bazooka and shot The Boss in the face, replacing the weapon immediately after the shot and pulling the scimitar to dash away.

She never got the chance as the demon responded with a triple blast from its cannon in rapid succession, not even fazed by her rocket. Shantae dodged three bright, compact fireballs with ease. Then explosions blossomed behind her, pelting her back painfully with dirt and stone chips. Such overwhelming might! All the tanks and cannons of Ammo Baron seemed like toys in comparison, the bosses of the Sequin Land silly and weak.

She glanced around. The way along the fort walls... Was impassable: to narrow! Even if she dodges these missiles, the resulting blasts as they hit the wall would splatter her across the moat.

The only way now... She dodged three more shots... was back into the yard. Which looked so small now, so cramped, with so many obstacles for the missiles to explode against. Trees, the central fountain. Upraised rectangles of garden beds surrounded by stone walls... Jump down into the moat? The same problem as with fleeing sideways. She'd be trapped under the bridge and who knows if The Boss could simply bring it down on her head? Or just lean over the railing and shoot down, blasting her like a fish in a barrel?

It was utterly predictable, so far, always shooting straight at her in series of three. And it was slowly crossing the bridge, pausing to shoot. Driven by terror, she did the rational thing closing the distance. Maybe it would stop advancing if she was close enough?

The thought of dying horrible, fiery death if this one could breathe fire... just wouldn't leave.

The Boss reacted to her joining it on the bridge by lifting its metallic hoof high. A shockwave stomp! A familiar move of many monsters back home, even Squid Baron used it. Scared of how powerful this one's stomp would be, she jumped as high as she could to float in the air on the pirate hat.

The Mighty Stomp came out deafening, dust rising from the crushed cobblestones, stone chips flying. Cowed, Shantae floated backwards, dropping down just in time to dodge another trio of shots. Shouldn't Doomguy be here by now? She gasped, imagining him laying fallen into some trap and requiring urgent help. While this monstrosity was pushing her further and further into the yard, backing her into a literal corner!

The initial rush of terror subsided to a slow, steady burn, the icy feeling in her veins making her reflexes faster, her perception sharper. Backing away, she kept glancing back, keeping the obstacles behind her in mind. When one of the blasts hit the fountain in the yard center but failed to smash it to pieces, she noticed. When another hit but the decoration still stood, blood flowing serenely, a plan began forming in her head.

Backing to the side, always aware of obstacles for the missiles to hit, Shantae backed away rapidly to crouch down behind the fountain. Blast after blast was hitting the simplistic decoration of a thick, short column with a thinner one on top of it, covered in streaming blood. Was it enchanted? No matter. This was her chance.

The monstrosity stopped shooting and started walking around the fountain, moving to her right. Shantae ran around it on the other side, pulling the scimitar out. Two blasts buffeted the unyielding fountain, one demolished a tree to her left.

Then her invulnerability was on, she was tearing across the bridge at breakneck speeds. Mindful what happened with Doomguy's rocket — the bruise on the small of her back was still smarting a bit — she twisted her path as best as she could, a couple missiles overtaking her slowly to explode against the cliff face.

Blurring up the stairs, hoping to reach the red key door, she... barely managed to stop in time not to ram an army disembarking from the lift platform that had just arrived. A densely packed crowd of huge cuirass-wearing cacklers, more than twice her height, was just unentangling from each other, bulky forms of fire-throwing fatsos visible behind them, spiky apes and zombies hurrying to climb out to avoid being trampled.

Shantae froze, the only thought going through her head were Doomguy's words "danger sense would be useless against projectiles that chase you like bloodhounds". That, and the image of him devastating hiding spiky apes in the blood swamp with exactly the same shoulder-pad mounted mini-cannons that adorned the armor of these big bony monsters.

The ree-veh-somethings let out a chorus of angry hissing. A hasty spiky ape launched its fireball at Shantae, hitting the cackler in front of it. The bone hulk responded by grabbing the smaller thing by its ankle to slam it repeatedly and violently into the ground, bones cracking and blood splattering with each hit.

Shantae unfroze, running down the stairs, scimitar already out as half the cacklers fired their shoulder cannons while others went down in a tangle of skeletal limbs.

Even speeding away, towards the approaching Boss, she was feeling their fireballs gaining on her, washing her back with heat even through invulnerability of the dash, promising fiery demise. She dodged three missiles from The Boss, barely: it was hard to steer while in this magic-empowered dash. Then the towering hulk lifted its foot, aiming to stomp her into paste. Unable to steer away, Shantae grit her teeth and held her breath as she dashed under the upraised hoof, the curve of her ponytail clipping it.

A split second later shockwave buffeted her, sending her on uncontrollable collision course with the fountain.

The macabre decoration withstood Shantae slamming into it, its blood-soaked column blurring and doubling in her vision as she stumbled, momentarily dazed... The Boss! The missiles! She was already backsliding to the side, whirling around to to face the monstrosity when... she was presented with the view of its immense, chiseled buttocks. What...?

Several more fireballs popped against The Boss like paltry firecrackers, doing absolutely no visible damage but offending it greatly, judging by the roar it let out. Still stunned by this surprise turn of events, Shantae began half-consciously backing towards the gates leading inside the fort. She just needed a second to pull the lever and wait for the doors to rise. A second she would never have had if the giant monster's attention was still on her.

The Boss began firing at the army of assorted cacklers and other monsters. As densely packed as they were? She'd bet on The Boss any time of the week. The army stood no chance against its might.

She slipped inside before the doors were even halfway up. And flattened herself against the wall, not taking... Uh-oh, the entrance hall was still full of those glowing barrels scattered all around. If a missile, no, if even just one bullet or fireball gets here...

Yelping, Shantae fled left, not waiting for the doors to begin closing. Judging by the sounds, the fight between The Boss and the other monsters was gaining in intensity. Those barrels could blow any moment!

Back in the somewhat familiar corridor, she finally stopped to wonder where her companion could be. Everything here... Wait, wasn't this door locked before? She peered into a passage leading down into the cellars. It was very dark down there, the space cluttered with wooden barrels, crates and other obstacles.

"Hello?" she called into the darkness. "Anyone in there?"

"I ssmelll human!" a creepy, hissing voice crowed from the darkness. "I ssmelll fear!"

Followed by Doomguy's desperate "Run, Shant—" and buzzing, tearing sound of tinker gatlings, muzzle flashes throwing the dark space into a flashing, strobing chaos.

She wanted to stay, to help but her legs betrayed her making her take a step back from those sounds that brought up flashes of painful memories of dying to such a weapon.

A good thing, too, as a man in familiar-shaped but dark, somehow corrupt-looking armor jumped out of the door, the glass of his black helmet backlit with twin beacons of hellfire that were this thing's eyes. A hail of bullets hit the door-frame only for the dark one to jump effortlessly, almost as high as Shantae could, much higher than Doomguy ever could, disappearing from the harm's way completely.

While the man in black was descending from his jump, already struggling to point his gatling at her, time slowed to a crawl in a surge of desperation. Shantae realized: this was it. The end of the line. Unless she manages bringing him down fast, her painful dying experience would repeat itself. But she couldn't...! Or could she?

The bazooka would kill her as surely at such point-blank distances. The assault rifle wasn't feeling powerful enough. She couldn't jump onto his head with scimitar pointing down because he could jump as well. Other local items? Invisibility would be no help against a hail of bullets. A soul sphere would, probably, prolong her agony. A rune...

A rune could work, being akin to super-super monster milk. Right?

Shantae activated it as she pulled it out of her inventory.

A wave of burning, blinding rage washed over her, bubbling in her blood as she whipped at the air in front of her blindly, overcame by desire to destroy, to kill someone!

The hateful enemy descended into her view, she began hitting first his feet, then his torso, his armor warping and splitting under her blows, gashes opening in his flesh as Shantae let out a roar, craving for blood and carnage. More! More warm bodies! The man in front of her stumbled backwards. Then he fell, his innards spilling out, his body caving and splitting. More rage! More hate! Her vision all shades of red, Shantae continued whipping the dead body, crouching down as it fell to the floor, turning her adversary into unrecognizable meat with inarticulate roars of joyful rage. Never in her entire life had she felt so free, so powerful!

"You know, your hair turns red when you use it," Doomguy's quiet words reached through the haze of red, slamming onto her like a bucket of icy water.

Shantae froze, staring in mute horror at shredded and scattered meat in front of her. The colors were returning. She stood up on shaky legs and hugged her ponytail tightly. It was crimson. And not from the blood, no, it was pristine, nothing would stick to her magnificent hair. No, crimson was its natural color, down to the last strand.

"Are... Are my eyes white?" she squeaked, fearing the answer. She was still feeling a faint urge to maim, to lash out at Doomguy, but she was too horrified for that to matter.

"Yes," her companion replied cautiously. "But anyone's eyes turn solid white and glowing when they use the demon strength rune."

He wouldn't understand. Not without knowing about her past. So she tried telling him, halting and fumbling for words. About her magical half being torn out of her, turned evil and turned against her. About having to kill her magic. About her evil twin having crimson hair and glowing white eyes. How horrified she was of having turned evil. All the signs were there! She should have never used that rune, should just have let that creep kill her and be done with it.

"I, uh, think you got the wrong idea," Doomguy said after a pause, trying to scratch his head, his armored fingers clacking against his helmet. "Look, I'm not that good with this stuff, but... Evil is inside everyone. You just keep it buried, suppressed, sleeping... whatever. Civvies... I mean, normal people living peaceful lives, leave it at that. You, as a hero of your homeland... I suppose, too, if you had no trouble fighting as you were. But when you face Hell and your strength is not enough, your punches not powerful enough, your ammo pool not deep enough... Then stepping onto that slippery slope could be the only thing that lets you win. You... ah hell, you fight evil with evil, to put it bluntly."

"Fight... evil with evil?" Shantae mumbled, uncertain. Yes, she sided with Risky Boots to thwart much greater evil, but...

"It's very simple," Doomguy said. "You wrangle your inner darkness into submission and ride it, not letting it ride you. That guy," He pointed at the bloody mess making her squirm uncomfortably, "he succumbed to it. He let it rule him and turn him into a monster. You... I believe you are better than that. You can do it."

"I... succumbed to it," Shantae said quietly. "I... felt so much joy breaking this inferior—" She wrestled a sadistic grin off her lips, hard. "You see? I can't! I'm not strong enough! I lost myself in it the moment I activated that accursed item!"

"Naw," Doomguy reassured her. "The first time gets into your head hard, it's like a strong drink..." He paused, then asked in a strange voice: "You are old enough to drink where you are from, right?"

"Eeh...?" Now she was completely lost. "What do you mean? If I couldn't drink before certain age, I'd die! Everyone needs to drink! And how could drinking get into your head? I admit I drink hard after a long trek through burning sands, but..."

"Uh, no," Doomguy said. "I meant, ᚹᛁᛊᚲᛁ, ᚢᛟᛞᚲᚨ, ᛒᛝᚱ. Stuff like that?"

"Sorry." She tilted her head in confusion. "Those words just now were gibberish."

Doomguy stood there for a moment, his posture conveying incredulity.

"ᚹᛁᚾᛖ?" he continued. "Alcohol? Designer medicine? Do any of these ring a bell?"

"Eeeh," Shantae scratched the back of her head. What was he going about? "Alcohol is what the Doctor uses to swab at your wounds. Burns like fire ants but kills all the evil bacilli good. Designer medicine, I understand the words but they make no sense together. Medicine made by a designer...? Oh, and the first one was gibberish."

"Opium?" He tried without any hope.

"A very dangerous painkiller," Shantae recited. "Best left for hopeless patients with incurable diseases. It dulls the pain but eats at your mind. If you lose an arm or a leg, better tough it out and hobble to nearest place where you can get your hands on a healing potion... Well, that's what the Doctor said. Why are you..." Then it hit her. "Oh, ohhh! You listed names of mind-altering potions, haven't you? But who in their right mind would drink such stuff? And why?"

"Uh, to relax in a good company," Doomguy said defensively. "To drown your sorrows. To prove you are man enough... Lots of reasons."

"Your people are weird," Shantae concluded with a smile. "I hope Rotty never gets her hands on any of these. She'd find too many uses for practical jokes, for my comfort... But I understand what you wanted to say. Evil is a strong and treacherous mind-altering force, it requires focus and dedication to master it and not let it master you. I believe I can do it. Uh... How long would this effect last? I'm itching to hit someone, it's manageable but irritating."

"About ten, fifteen minutes." She finally noticed that he was wounded, his armor battered, seeping blood. "Mind if ask you how it went for you while I'm patching myself up? I can hear quite telling footsteps from here."

The floor was trembling almost imperceptibly showing that that monstrosity with its iron leg was walking around.

"Only if you take healing potion after," she declared with finality. "I know we should use it sparingly, but I also know that non-magical medicine only goes so far. And then, this." She pulled one of the blue armor power-ups from her inventory, letting it hover above the cobblestone floor, glowing.

"Aye-aye, Doc," he replied good-naturedly, beginning to remove parts of his armor.

That was... a lot of bruises. And those puncture wounds...

In short, Shantae had to refresh her firmly forgotten first aid lessons when she was helping to pull those bullets out. Not a completely foreign experience, because she had a couple embarrassing mishaps where she had to pick stuck arrowheads out of her own body. One word: Ouch.

"So, I stand on the bridge when this red key door opens," she was telling. "And out comes a little brother of That Boss. Well, you know. Made me flit around on wings of terror, figuratively."

"It's called ᚲᛁᛒᛖᚱᛞᛖᛗᛟᚾ(robodemon)," Doomguy elaborated. "One mean son of a— Nevermind."

"Mean and pretty powerful," Shantae agreed. "When it started shooting I realized I had no way but back into the yard as he had all the squares along the walls threatened, so to speak. Uh, you are familiar with Chaturanga, right? Anyway, I moved in close..."

"Many good men died thinking that was a good idea," Doomguy groused checking that the gauze was wrapped tight.

"I know, right? That stomp is frighteningly effective, but I've seen it before a hundred times! So many bosses of Sequin Land like flinging shockwaves around that I got jumping over them down to an art. The pirate hat helps too. Anyway, I got saved by the fountain, of all things. Let me circle around and dash away. But that's when I found an army crawling out of that lift straight beyond the red key door!"

"An army?" her companion tensed.

"Don't worry!" Shantae reassured him. "They shot at me, I dashed back under the robodemon, all the fireballs hit him, he took offense... Deliver and convert, or how it goes? I think there is only the boss remaining now."

"We should get going," Doomguy said quickly fitting all the armor pieces back together, then touching the blue item. All the dents and holes in his armor disappeared — so this was like a healing potion for equipment? — as his armor glowed briefly. It didn't change color, though.

"I agree," Shantae said. "Maybe there are still monsters left, I have to test this superpowered evil mode on something hostile, learn how it works without blood rage... In case I have to use such items again." She paused, thinking. "Say, what do you think of jumping out of windows? I think there were unbarred windows facing outside in some rooms and it wasn't that far to the ground..."

They left the fort that way, sneaking quietly across the bridge as the scuffed robodemon kept walking around the fountain kicking at loose cobbles. The bridge was painted red, blood running in rivulets along the parapets to soak the soil. Judging by the quantity of remains, several lift platforms worth of monsters perished there, including even one still recognizable bephlegor. The most hilarious detail was a blue skull key embedded in the gore. Obviously, one of the monsters was carrying it. So this fort hadn't really been passable without Shantae's sequence breaking climbing until the monsters came and took their places.

Thankfully, the unstoppable behemoth haven't noticed the two heroes tiptoeing away from him towards the lift.

Then a creaking platform was carrying them upwards, toward new kinds of hell.

(シーンブレイク)

 **A.N.** :  
Yes, the cyberdemon in Brutal Doom has a mighty stomp attack. You failed to dodge? Rest in pieces.  
Yes, the revenats (knights and barons as well) do have this "smacking an imp/zombie against the ground" finisher. They also throw the hapless body at _you_ for massive damage.  
No, revenants don't tangle in each other's limbs and fall down. I postulate they were packed too densely in this case, their hitboxes overlapping. Which doesn't happen in the game.

(シーンブレイク)

Last updated: Mar 08, 2019, with minor bug fixes: I caught some while translating this chapter to Russian.


	8. Culinary Habits

This... wasn't looking promising. The Upper Hell the command envisioned to be solid land, a plateau it looked from down there at the portal, was turning to be a scattering of lone crags and smallish rock massifs rising from the shroud of darkness below. Many were topped with small castles but what I wasn't seeing was some central hub of activity — a city, a giant castle, a dark spire piercing the orange clouds overhead.

There was no such thing. No castle big enough to be fitting of the overlord I had to find.

The castle ahead us was small as well, just three spiky watch towers over a battered two-story high wall of tan brick, with a modest-sized building behind them.

What wasn't small was the horde stampeding towards us across a wide wooden bridge over the chasm separating us from the castle. Pinkies first - not rabid, thankfully - mixed with imps and axe-wielding zombies. "Don't—" I began, but _of course_ it was too late before I even finished switching to the flamethrower.

My companion sped forward with a battle cry, a blue-and-tan blur topped with purple, a black triangle of her pants seat in the middle. Less than a second later she exploded through the ranks, blood and viscera and body parts splashing around her like the wake of a ship.

The surviving monsters roared, some reorienting after her, imps lobbing fireballs. Their offense stalled, turned into a chaotic crowd trying to move in opposite directions at once. I switched to my trusty pump-action shotgun, backing away and to the side, killing the few pinkies still coming at me.

Of course, with the walls and towers festooned with dozens of imps, their fireballs like rain focused on me, the pinkies that managed to get close caught that barrage. squarely in their rumps. Most got set on fire - there was a lot of fireballs - but one survived, doing one-eighty, intent on giving the imps a piece of its tiny mind. Utterly pointless, of course, as the brown beasts were up on the wall and the pinkies are too dumb for such complex concept as "going around".

The roaring pinkies on fire fell into the chasm, I had culled the imp crowd on the wall quite a bit and the main horde began reorienting towards me when Shantae finally returned, exploding through the demons again, the blur resolving into a girl skidding to a stop beside me, making a face at all the gore.

Very efficient loose cannon she was, having mowed down a number equivalent to a dozen rockets, but her habit of rushing ahead... Vexing, was the polite word.

"Stand back!" I barked switching to the flamethrower while dodging a barrage of fireballs. The horde - still dozens strong - was stampeding at us now. Taking an extra second to make sure the hot-blooded maiden was firmly behind me, I let napalm fly. Then I had to dodge burning demons, roaring in pain, running each which way, falling into the chasm in droves. Those that happened to run back caused more roars of pain as they bumped into their still intact kin. Infighting followed as those responded to pain with vicious slashing and biting. The stench was outstanding, even by local standards.

"Theihr..." Shantae's voice was tight, choking. I allowed myself a brief glance back. She was just trying not to retch. Forcing it down with effort, she squeezed out "There's... a bunch of knights and barons coming!"

Oh.

Moving onto the bridge quickly, I shot napalm again, turning the wide corridor beyond the gate into an oven full of screaming, overcooked demons. That should take care of the fodder.

Right on cue, green bolts of hellfire started flying from the smoke. I dodged, moving to stand beside the gate. Thankfully, whoever constructed this castle was an idiot: instead of being flush with the tower's face, the gate was sunk in an arch deep enough it concealed me from every imp. Allowing enemy concentrating at the gate unharrassed... On the other hand, if that cyberdemon was usually stationed here, that would be even helpful, like funneling all the meat straight into meat-grinder.

Shantae fell back, harrassing the enemy from afar using her magical blaster, dodging the rain of fireballs with contemptuous ease. I switched to the assault shotgun. I don't use this silvery pig iron much: too heavy, has too much spread, packs noticeably less punch per shell than my other two and takes forever and a half to reload — but. But its twenty-shell magazine makes for unsurpassed endurance against tougher crowds. Like now, with knights, then barons coming out.

I kept blasting the bruisers in the backs of their heads. They were ignoring their beheaded kin, their hate firmly on Shantae. Had she not drawn it, now would be a good moment to provoke these heavy hitters into attacking the imps. But as they were, the multitude of fireballs hitting their broad backs was simply ignored. Finally, new ones stopped coming. The baron and the few knights already out there were coming too close to my companion, who had backed away to the edge of the abyss next to the roofed lift platform. My assault shotgun ran out and I was switching to the railgun when she suddenly employed her sword-dash, ramming the baron.

It didn't work. Like with that bephlegor earlier, she bounced back, unbalanced, while the reddish beast doubled over clutching at its privates and bellowing in pain. No! I raised the railgun to my shoulder, a knight's head in my cross-hair then gone in an instant.

My weapon whined, beginning its slow, _slow_ recharging cycle. The three remaining knights launched their spread-shots almost point-blank.

Judging by the lack of charred body parts flying, Shantae managed to dodge somehow. The knights went swinging, aiming low. One second later my companion re-emerged from the cover of their backs in a sliding pirouette that ended in her hair-whipping at the leftmost knight. But the baron should be recovering right about now.

The railgun finished cycling. I lined my next shot up carefully, managing to hit the baron and two knights through the center of mass. The baron bellowed, attacking Shantae despite the ragged bloody hole through its torso. One of the knights collapsed and the other one was merely staggered, still alive somehow.

She went close in, dodged the baron's right swing, feinted an attack and ducked under the following left swing, stopping behind the bruiser's back. She then performed a mix of back kick and split stand: her right foot went under the enemy's buttock, with her left foot firmly on the ground. Overextended, the baron staggered, losing its balance. An impressive display of super-strength, she must be at least on the level of strongest Marines.

The fireballs hit, having been focused more or less on the same area. The wounded knight went up in flames, the second one bellowed in pain, staggered, and the baron was still alive somehow, despite looking like shit: charred, dripping green blood from a gaping wound... and still attacking fiercely, its one remaining eye burning bright red like a laser sight.

I switched to the assault rifle and quickly whittled his remaining life to nothing with aimed headshots. Shantae was... dancing in front of the remaining knight, more sliding around than actually hitting. What was she... Oh. She slid to the side just before the next barrage of fireballs arrived, aimed at her but hitting the knight, turning it into a living, screeching pyre.

There was still a lot of imps up there.

We went to check the inside of the castle first. The wide corridor beyond the gate led into a spacious hall, two rows of golden chandeliers framing the central passage leading to wide, twenty foot tall doors in the back wall framed by glowing pillars of blue skull ornaments. Requiring a key, obviously. There were also two doors in the front wall leading, presumably, to the side watch towers, one of them requiring a red key. Plus two doors in the side walls, the right one requiring a yellow key. Huh, this was probably a hub of sorts. We checked the left side door, only finding a store room and another door leading outside as the landscape beyond the window next to it indicated this was the outer wall.

With nothing of use readily available, exploring this castle further would only exhaust our ammo supply. We only needed to find a good vantage point to search for clues on the location of the overlord. Coincidentally, the highest tower of this castle was that vantage point. So we had to clear the imps to allow Shantae safe access.

Imp sniping was a dangerous chore, but with caution we did it, even saving a few rounds thanks to my companion's blaster. She made to climb the wall, but I stopped her, berated her for running ahead without warning — she looked fittingly sheepish — and taught her to yell "hostiles" when encountering enemy, "clear" when she is sure there are no more enemies and "reloading" when she goes to reload her AR. Only then I let her loose.

Removing her boots, Shantae quickly climbed the wall while I kept watch thirty meters away, at the other side of the bridge. When she reached the top of the right section of the right wall and leaned to look inside, there were faint hisses of angry imps.

"Hostiles!" she yelled, producing her AR and spraying down. Dodging a couple more fireballs that splashed their burning residue on the wall, she then jumped down into the castle. A tense pause later — I couldn't hear what was happening over the wall — she yelled "Clear!" to appear a few seconds later in the main hall. "I was learning how to fight a spiky ape one-on one," she explained perkily when she jogged up to me.

"I see," I said. I hope she took all necessary precautions doing that out of my range. "So how was it?"

"They jump fiercely," she replied, pleased with herself. "But after that jump they pause, just long enough to kick them. One on one they are no match for me! It's their numbers... Anyway, let's go!"

She proceeded to climb, first the right wall section, then the central gate tower, disappearing in one of its big arched windows of the second story. A couple seconds later I heard a spirited "Oh, yeah!" — presumably, she found something. I had to teach her reporting such finds as well. Next, she leaned out of the left window to peer into the left portion of the castle... And jumped back with a girlish shriek, going so far as tumbling out of the opposite right window and arresting her fall with that purple bubble of hers. A second later mancubus fireballs sprayed the tower, their napalm-like residue setting stone walls on fire. One went inside the left window, hit the ceiling and rained fire all over that room — it was a _good_ thing Shantae got out.

"Hostiles!" she yelled belately, before folding her bubble and dropping down onto the wall. "Whew, what a scare! There is a lone mancubus in that yard. Just wait, I'll get him!" She began climbing the tower again, in its cover. This time she forgone the second story and the third one too. Reaching the spiky crown, she displayed impressive feat of acrobatics, managing to climb onto it over a negative incline: the wall there protruded a foot further than the wall she had been climbing! Finally reaching the edge, Shantae catapulted herself onto the flat roof, proving again she was both strong and light.

Then, walking boldly onto one of the huge iron spikes with the bazooka readied, she fired it almost straight down. She then made a surprised exclamation, aimed and fired again. That's right, you can't kill a mancubus with one rocket. These meaty beasts are too resilient, they require two.

Then she was walking around the tower top, staring into distance while shielding her eyes with her hand. Slowly and thoroughly, she surveyed the entire horizon.

Damn.

"I can't see any!" she shouted at me leaning over the edge. "It's all the same as far as I can see! That big red castle," she pointed in the direction we came from, "is the biggest one so far!"

Double damn.

"Wait," she continued. "I'll check what sort of road is behind those blue skull doors and where it leads! This building is only long enough for that big hall!" She disappeared.

So, this castle could be just another roadblock? It'd better be. A lone road with that many obstacles must have strategic importance, requiring cooperation of several leaders. In this Hell, that could only mean one thing: there was a demon above them, strong enough to _make_ them cooperate with an "or else" threatening enough to these stubborn beasts. Moving up the chain of command to find the supreme leader? That I could do.

It took Shantae a few minutes to return.

"Guess what?" she said jumping out of the gate tower's second-story window. "There is a blank wall there! This building has no other exits!"

"Say what?" This... actually surprised me, my train of thought grinding to a halt.

"There's a blank wall!" she elaborated. "It's not an illusion, I shot it. There is a sheer drop behind this building, no road or anything. But wait, there's more! I checked the side wings too, there is another blank wall where that door in the storage room should be. The window is there, but the door is not! Shall we...?"

"Yes," I grit. I swear, if this is some sort of devilry, demons making fake doors would feel pain. On the other hand, I know portals do exist.

Returning back to the storage room, we took positions to the sides of that inconspicuous door. Weathered wood planks with a circular ornament of a demonic face carved in the center, adorned with fresh blood like this was an idol they were making sacrifices to. I bumped it.

The door rattled up revealing a long corridor, its walls made of big white stone blocks, unlike the ubiquitous tan brick this castle was made of.

Shantae made an excited sound as she rushed to the window to confirm that yes, there was space overlap. "I never saw such magic before!" she gushed.

But I was focused on the stairs curving up ahead, a bit of sky visible through some sort of window.

A different sky, the color of dust, hazy clouds barely moving.

So, that door was a portal, after all. And judging by the size of that door back in the hall, we _had_ to find us a blue skull. I crept cautiously forward, walking up the curved stairs slowly.

There were no demons up there, only a large bracket-shaped gallery with tall arched windows opening into a deep chasm on all three sides. I could see red hazy glow framed by a big arch ahead, through the windows on the opposite side. Another portal? The air stank differently here, dust and ammonia instead of sulphur and carrion. There were forested hills outside, various castles visible through dusty haze.

And then, the nearest door rattled up releasing zombies armed with... brooms...?

"Hostiles!" I switched to the shotgun, mowing them down as they rushed to get their weapons, stumbling into other zombies still coming out of that door. All went down under my fire. But there were sounds of weapons being cocked from that door. I grabbed a frag grenade shouting "fire in the hole!" as I threw it. Shantae squeaked behind me — making me remember I didn't teach her this particular command — and, judging by the sounds, fell down the stairs. Dammit.

Bouncing off the door frame, the grenade exploded inside the room, followed by dying roars of a lone zombie, then silence. I glanced back. Shantae was standing up, rubbing at her side sheepishly. Shotgun readied, I charged through that door. Only shredded carcasses greeted me, scattered around a bare stone room. Beyond two low, wide barred windows the same hazy landscape could be seen, all forested hills and tiny castles.

Together, we checked three more doors, finding similar rooms but with huge cocoons of slimy, writhing flesh resting in pools of blood that seemed to eat depressions in the cobblestone floor. The view through windows facing in all directions confirmed that this was a lone building on a lone crag. We found one skull button but it was unresponsive, seemingly stuck in activated state with its eye sockets glowing.

We went to check the second portal but found nothing of use there, just an empty circular gazebo surrounded by endless expanse of boiling, glowing blood. The mirroring sea of blood overhead and the massive bloodfalls connecting the two planes were just scenery. The blood-caked, skull-themed pedestal in the center was empty.

Shantae then went climbing to check the small towers crowning the roof. Nothing, empty decorations. There were no other floors or windows we haven't seen yet, she said. Still there was one balcony, not quite reachable, ways off from the closest gallery window. She had no trouble getting there, found an empty room with quite an ammunition cache and a red skull key.

Red. Not the blue we needed or at least yellow to explore that other door, but a useless key to an empty yard.

There was also an apparent teleporter platform, or "warp platform" as she called it. Damn it to hell and again. I could, in theory, make a running jump there but it was hair-thin line between me landing just right and me plummeting to my death. So it was up to Shantae to explore where that went. "Don't worry," she said trying to sound brave and nonchalant, "That's what my spare lives are for." Suppressing the feeling of being a callous asshole I called go ahead. A tense moment later... She ported into the gallery not far from me.

Dammit!

I punted the closest puntable object - a tin bucket full of dirty soapy water. It splashed, tumbling and clanging against the wall and... disgorging a yellow skull key.

Shantae snorted, then laughed out loud, unable to help herself.

"Yeah," I said with relief, feeling a smile tugging at the corners of my lips. "That works too."

So we went exploring that other door in the first castle.

Beyond the yellow door there was another storage closet, full of wooden crates and barrels and imps. It only took two rockets to make a total mess of these. Shantae made a face at the gore-splattered floor and donned her magical pirate boots. After that, there was a curving staircase going through what should have been the empty space outside. It led us to a dark room, its wide windows showing equally dark landscape, visibility smothered by ash hanging in the air like a thick fog.

All right, here we go. Taking position at the next door—

"What is that thing?" Shantae exclaimed behind me. "Oh... Hostiles!"

I turned around aiming my shotgun at the window. The pain elemental that sneaked up on us was floating just outside, its huge eye blinking in confusion. I was switching to the minigun when it finally made that distinctive pain elemental-y grunt and opened its maw wide.

"Get back, they explode when they die!" I warned activating manual barrel spin-up. The latticed window frames were too narrow for the brown spheroid to get inside, but that half of the room was still threatened.

The first lost soul condensed from the flames in the monster's mouth before I could start firing, launching at my companion who just grunted and went hair-whipping at it. Then my minigun was up to speed and I shredded the blasted thing before it could build up its infamous ablative shield of lost souls. It exploded into gore and flame, a couple more lost souls emerging from the explosion. I switched to the shotgun to mop them up, conserving the minigun rounds I was still low on. The screech of a lost soul dying told me Shantae finished her opponent as well.

"I'm afraid to ask," she said, "But they... don't have a limit, don't they?"

"No, the pain elementals don't have a limit," I confirmed. "Let one live for too long and there's a swarm shielding it from your fire, soaking up your ammo. Shotgun doesn't stun them for long enough and bazooka is too dangerous because these damned skulls charge you all the time."

Moving further we found a prison. Dark, dank, stinky cells with heaps of hay and holes in the floor for toilets. And... Cacos, I could understand. But who in their right mind imprisons zombies _with their weapons_?" That one shotgun guy almost got us.

Also, Shantae got her chance to observe an arch-vile in controlled conditions. Close up, even. Stuck in one of the cells, this monster provided an unusual challenge: it kept resurrecting inmates in adjacent cells until we finally put it down.

And then an unassuming side door rose without warning, revealing... A lot of demons. Revenants in front, bazooka jumped into my hands by reflex. Anti-tank rocket exploding in such close quarters was rattling - doubly so for Shantae, without hearing protection - but at least these most dangerous monsters went down. Barons and knights were coming next, filling a narrow staircase that led down. I fired two more rockets into that enclosed space, killing one knight and staggering other monsters, when the top half of one of the downed revenants rose on its arms, hissing angrily. I shifted my aim down, but the stubborn thing had already walked towards us, too close now. It was going to fire!

As I was switching to the railgun, Shantae ran forward with a wordless shout to perform a dramatic spin-kick that took the thing's skull cleanly off its shoulders. My old hand-to-hand combat instructor would have criticized the move for being flashy and full of openings. But she only used it against a target that couldn't strike back, didn't she?

The baron recovered, enraged, and raised his arms wide for a spread-shot. Shantae waited, jumpy and twitchy, until the last moment, then avoided the five-fireball salvo by dropping onto all fours. I dodged by strafing, then finished aiming and fired. Hyper-velocity plasma bolt tore through the baron and all the monsters behind him whose heads were in my line of fire. They all died. There were roars of pain from ones further down, wounded by the blast from the ceiling hit.

Shantae shuffled close to the door, peering inside. She then yelled "fire in the hole!" throwing a grenade down the stairs — and slid away along the wall in her signature motion that was not unlike my high-speed boot-skating.

The explosion brought more bellows of pain. "Grenades are wasted on tougher monsters," I explained as I switched to the bazooka and ran to the door. Confirming that the monsters were far enough, I fired a single rocket at them. Weakened by the earlier hits, all knights died. "It takes too many to bring one down and they rarely crowd densely enough. Your grenade weakened them, though, saving us one rocket." I squinted. Were these piles of meat...? "And it seems you got a couple minigun zombies for company. So don't—"

And then the chunks of pulped flesh flowed together with wet crunching sounds, mangled bodies turning back into intact knights and zombies, accompanied by very distinctive hissing grunts that sounded like mocking laughter.

"Archvile!" I shouted as I fired my weapon again and again, until the drum ran empty, dodging green fireballs from the resurrected knights. "Reloading!" I pulled away from the door, taking cover. "There's one wounded knight left, but the vile can raise others any moment!" I warned.

"I'll try სხიმიტარ dash!" Shantae proclaimed eagerly as she took position across the door, that huge sword in hand. "Here we go!" She ran, then blurred down the stairs, a huge wet impact accompanying her descent followed by a vile's scream of pain a fraction of a second later. I grit my teeth, staying patiently out of the reckless girl's return path. There were her spirited shouts, distinctive archvile grunts, then crackling of fire... Please hurry back!

A fiery projectile exploded out of the door like a cannon blast that hit the corner of the wall and ceiling opposite it. Shantae materialized there, dropping from fifteen or so feet up along cobbles knocked loose. She barely managed to land on her feet, stumbled and fell over, smoking a bit. "There are... two archviles," she managed dazedly, trying to get up. She looked intact, just stunned, despite having been blown up by arch-vile fire.

The knights bellowed their challenge, whole and healthy yet again. I switched to the super shotgun, waited for them to go up the stairs and beheaded them one point-blank shot each. The viles were welcome to try raising them here, from all the way down. News flash: they couldn't. The radius of their vile magic is ten, fifteen feet at best.

I then threw two grenades down the stairs in quick succession. Contrary to my earlier teachings? Not at all. One vile was quite banged up from Shantae ramming it. My gamble worked, grenades finished it off. Their dying cry "yekhoyoy!" is quite distinct, whatever they mean to say. Don't know, don't care. Switching to the chainsaw — and warning Shantae to stay away, because her hair whip and chainsaws should never be in the same room, ideally — I dashed down the stairs. There were no other monsters in the small room the stairs led to, except the remaining vile and the minigun zombie it was raising, claws glowing crimson. I loped the zombie's head off in one swing. The vile raised its hands that began glowing yellow, crackling flame springing up around me. I revved my chainsaw, swinging at the abomination's side and pushing on the handle with everything I got. Its flesh was tough, but it was yielding. Its spell got interrupted two or three inches in. Blood flying, staining everything around but most of it landing on me, I kept digging the roaring blade into the demon's side until I cut it clean in two. With another "yekhoyoy!" it fell dead.

"That's one mean tinker-sword," Shantae commented from the stairs where she kept her respectful distance.

"It's a saw, really," I corrected her, cleaning the mechanized tool as best as I could. "For chopping down trees and stuff."

Surveying the small room revealed another staircase leading further down. It was impossible not to notice, what with the stench of stagnant water mixed with carrion and sewage. The stairs ended in a vast, flooded hall. Rows upon rows of columns were disappearing into pitch-black darkness, supporting vaulted ceiling. The air here was only breathable thanks to my helmet filters. Shantae made a face, pulled a skull-themed scarf from somewhere and tied it around her face. I swung my flashlight's beam around, bringing the columns into visibility. The far walls were still to be seen.

The cherry on top of this crap cake...? The blue skull key propped innocently on a wooden barrel, deep in the hall. Hard to miss because these keys glow.

"I... I'll scout ahead," Shantae whispered stepping into the water with a shudder. The foul, muddy liquid proved to only be ankle deep, not enough to flood her boots but enough to slow her down.

I switched to the minigun, the universal weapon effective against almost any target without switching.

She made maybe three steps when she froze, shuddering and hyperventilating. I tensed. She made stumbling, involuntary steps back until her back hit the walls next to the entrance. She didn't seem to be noticing that, still trying to back away, her teeth chattering.

"What's wrong?" I asked quietly. "Get a hold on yourself, you're panicking!"

"R..right." She forced herself to take a deep breath, heedless of the miasma here barely passing for air. "Right. Panicked relic hunter is a dead relic hunter. Fear snuffs reason. Right. I—" She took another deep breath. "Hostiles. There are eyes glowing in the dark. Only the eyes. It's them. The invisible pink gorillas."

"All right," I said pulling back up the stairs and pulling her after me by her arm. "Here's what we do. I go down there and torch that hall. I don't have much napalm left, but I see no better alternative. That would draw them all out. We fight a retreating battle up these staircases, turning them into killzones—"

"No," she refused firmly despite her voice shaking. "Fears are to be faced head-on lest they fester poisoning your resolve. The ceiling there is high enough. I got another სხიმიტარ move, it allows me bouncing on their heads if there are enough monsters."

"You'll get killed for nothing!" my outburst was almost too loud. What was she thinking!

"Don't worry, I had a lot of practice on feral zombies back home," she said trying to reassure, it seems, not just me but herself as well. "That blue spiral cannon can shoot through any number of monsters, right? Then you can slay a lot in one or two shots as they gather under me!"

Was she tempting me with ammo economy?

"Come on," Shantae continued. "We'd save so many charges at the cost of a small-small risk to lose one spare life!"

She was. Like she wasn't the one to be torn apart viciously if her gamble failed!

"All right," I agreed grudgingly. I was really quite low on ammo for most convenient guns. We were both stocked with rockets but you can't use the bazooka against pinkies in such enclosed spaces. They close in too fast!

Twenty or thirty cells for a few railgun shots I could spare, on the other hand. Then polish the stragglers off using my assault shotgun.

Stepping carefully into the foul water I took position near the exit, trying to stay concealed for the time being.

With a loud shout, half terror and half challenge, Shantae power-dashed right up to the barrel with the key - running on top of water, I noticed - which was accompanied with snarls of alerted spectres that rolled across the hall like a wave. At the key she stopped, sinking a bit, replacing her sword...? Oh, she used the little time she had to throw two grenades deeper into the hall. Then she tensed, bouncing on the balls of her feet but still sans her sword. I had railgun out and primed, not that I could save her if her plan didn't work. But I sure as hell was going to try.

The ring of splashes converged on her, closing... Shantae jumped good ten feet up, bringing her sword out and mounting it like a pogo-stick. Then she descented into the snarling, snapping mass of flickering pink shadows — and went literally pogoing on the sword, each bounce accompanied by a grunt of pain. She was twisting and shifting, focused completely on searching her next landing spot. The spectres were crowding, getting in each other's way, their awkward lunges cut short. The plan was working!

Aiming a bit to the side - because my companion had to bounce off something solid which guts and chunks weren't - I fired as she reached another apex. The explosion of gore was even more massive that I had anticipated, bloody mist actually denying me line of sight. Thankfully, it cleared enough by the time my railgun finished cycling. I fired again, with much the same result. Shantae's bouncing was steady, there was still a solid foothold of densely packed spectres below her. The demons were growing wise to my presence: a wave of splashes, snarls and very visible glowing eyes was stampeding towards me. I waited until the railgun finished cycling and fired for the third time, shredding both through this group and Shantae's. Then I switched to the assault shotgun and was busy for awhile, retreating into the staircase. I hurried back into the hall as soon as I was out of demons. There was no sign of Shantae, just spectres running somewhere, judging by the splashes they were making. Then a line of blurry afterimages and gory explosions zipped across the hall between the column rows. The stampeding splashes reversed their direction. Like moth to the flame. Or lemmings. The inventive young lady made two more passes before dashing towards me. I finished a couple stragglers off, and that was it. Shantae was smiling, pleased with herself. She wasn't even breathing hard. But boy, was she splattered with blood and gore, her skin and clothing now the same color: messy red. I suppose I wasn't looking better: CQC using chainsaws does that to you.

"Eww!" Shantae hair-whipped at the nearby wall a couple of times, her ponytail coming out mostly clean. Her bangs were still glued to her forehead and tiara, though. "So gross...! Well, I guess this was inevitable." She sighed, tugging at the blood-soaked scarf still covering her face. "Shall we?"

And then we had to search for the key in this murky cesspit because the barrel propping it got, of course, trampled.

It wasn't pleasant. But that had very little relevance.

Finally, we were standing in front of the tall doors leading into yet another dimension. Readying my plasma guns, I touched the doors with the still stinking blue skull.

The wings swung open with barely a sound revealing... a grand hall of white marble, its arched windows showing yet another vista of featureless red sky over pitch blackness. The hall was well lit by torches on the walls and golden chandelabras on the floor. We found ourselves on a balcony of sorts, running along the wall and descending down in two symmetric grand carpeted staircases. This was the richest decorated place I've seen so far - a good sign.

There were various grunts and other quiet sounds coming from down in the hall, telling us it was full of demons. We crept cautiously towards the railing to take a look.

"It smells so nice it makes me sick," Shantae whispered looking like she was ready to hurl. "Just thinking _what_ they are probably roasting there..."

Damn, I hadn't felt that. Probably, because of my helmet filters choked by shit.

Down there, the demons were... feasting. A huge table surrounded by a good two dozen of barons, filled with goblets and dishes and pans, all garish ornate gold, full of roasted meat. Was that a human ribcage on the dish that baron was emptying with gusto...? Yep.

Honestly, the sight didn't even fill me with outrage. It was just demons being themselves. My attitude towards them is sealed, there is no point in focusing on the obvious. Shantae, on the other hand, had to resort to breathing exercises.

But that was just minutae. The question was: what to do with this herd? There was a lot of barons down there, accompanied by a few sullen knights drinking from smaller goblets and a lot of imps and pinkies milling around begging for scraps. I matched the amount of cannon fodder down there against my ammunition reserves and the result wasn't pretty.

And then, the grand doors on the far end of the hall swung open revealing a cyberdemon, late for diner. The great demon walked towards the table like he owned the place, the crowd parting fearfully, giving him a wide berth. The barons bowed a little, in an unusual show of respect.

Me? I grinned viciously. The "us versus the army" just turned into "us versus one scuffed cyberdemon". I just had to play the dodge-ball right.

A crowd of zombies rushed in, laden with a huge dish and a metallic barrel of nukage. I paused: what were they going to do with these?

Both the oversized dish - with a whole pinky roasted on a spit - and the barrel were put on the table before the cyberdemon. Leaning down, he grabbed the barrel with his one good hand, raised it to his head and... started chugging it down...? What the hell...?

Downing the whole barrel, the cyberdemon threw it aside, burped contently and leaned again to grab the roasted pinky. He looked not pacified - I don't think that's even possible - but less murderous than usual. The other demons were giving him a wider berth now, though. I was wondering why when a series of small explosions raised dust and smoke behind the great beast who paused, then continued tearing into the roast.

"They... literally eat nukage and fart thunder," I voiced my disbelief. "Well, at least we now know what they need this green shit for." Indeed, some of the goblets down there were showing characteristic green glow.

I warned Shantae to stay away, back in the entrance hall. Because when dealing with cyberdemons one stray shot is all that takes to become a collateral smeared across the walls. She agreed, sounding apprehensive. Can't blame her.

Then it was time to rumble. Switching to the assault shotgun again, to get rid of small unexpected obstacles quickly, I tiptoed down the stairs, then rushed along the table to stop directly across the cyberdemon. The imps and pinkies were snarling, turning towards me me while the barons were oblivious yet. "GO FUCK YOURSELF!" I screamed at the great beast, flipping him two birds at once.

His bellow of rage shook the hall. I dashed further along the table, buffeted by shockwaves, imps and pinkies behind me exploding, barons roaring in pain. The cyberdemon unloaded at me with all he got, oblivious to obstacles in his line of fire.

Respectful the barons may be, but they don't take such offense lying down. A furious battle sounded behind me. But most demons in the hall were now gunning for me: pinkies stampeding, barons unleashing a torrent of green fire, imps adding their relatively puny fireballs.

It all went as well as you could expect from a mix of species that barely tolerate each other at the best of times. The pinkies soaked the baron balls, some exploding into charred meat, some doing one eighty to go give the barons a piece of their mind. Imps hit some baron or other, resulting in vicious mauling. I made a sharp turn to keep going around the table. The feast was quickly turning into a mess, goblets and dishes flying every which way, partly soaking up the baron fire aimed at me. A crowd of zombies rushed me, armed with frying pans and cleavers. I ignored them, leaving them behind as I dodged incoming cyberdemon salvo. There were explosions behind me, bloody splatter flying. The cyberdemon got hit in the back with a lot of baron balls - and that was enough to redirect his rage. Turning around, he unloaded into the still intact barons, shredding some and offending more, the wounded demon elite now returning fire deliberatedly. I was mostly dodging fire from the few bruisers still aiming at me and mopping up rare surviving imps.

The barons, however tough, did not last long against the angry cyberdemon. The two dozen became one, then half-dozen. Unrelenting, they rushed into melee - and were obliterated by his mighty stomp, together with half the table. Seriously, it's more like explosion, so much allo-energy he puts into his stomp...

Maneuvering carefully to place the few remaining knights between me and the cyberdemon, I fooled him into obliterating them as well while I made my escape up the stairs, out of the great demon's line of sight.

Now, a million dollar question: was the beast looking damaged enough not to survive a single BFG shot?

"Stay _behind_ me, at any cost," I warned Shantae as I switched to the gun in question. "You can't help me here, this thing obliterates _everything_ in a wide arc in front of me."

Here we go. I ran down into the hall, entering the cyberdemon's line of sight. Dodged his salvo - still enraged, still a six-shot burst instead of three. Then I pulled the trigger, causing the monster of a gun to begin powering up with ominous hum. I then moved along the table so that the balcony was behind me - just in case - all the while closing in. The cyberdemon abandoned aiming at me in favor of raising his steel hoof, preparing to stomp me. Then my BFG finally fired, blinding me with a massive, brilliant green flash.

I don't know how they made it so that the blast doesn't harm the shooter, even point-blank. This gun's secondary tracers are weird as well - something related to subspace manipulation, I guess. They are probably a side-effect, a quirk of this super-prototype - because who in their right mind makes anti-tank weapons most effective point-blank? But the wide-spanning tracers _do_ pack more hurt than the primary plasma ball. And the cyberdemon caught them all.

He exploded.

"We won!" Shantae exclaimed with light-hearted joy as she jumped over the railing to land next to me. "This cannon is terrific!"

"It is, indeed," I said surveying the hall. "At the cost of fifty cells, equivalent of five railgun shots or a very long plasmagun burst, it devastates large crowds all at once. Or kills a fresh cyberdemon in two shots."

"They really did it to each other," she said with disgust, looking around. Once fancy, the hall was trashed, walls cracked and blackened, floor a multicolored mess of shredded demon, broken furniture and scattered tableware. With pieces of human roast seeping fat here and there.

We headed for the far door. Its fifteen-foot tall wings wouldn't budge. There were no signs this door would require a key, so we started exploring. Checked the kitchen first. Should have made Shantae stand outside.

It wasn't the sight of whole bodies roasting over roaring fire, nor the butchered, flayed corpses on the tables, no.

It was the stock of fresh food, marines impaled on stakes like living kebabs, through their ass and out their breastbone, gasping, clutching at their stake in pain or crying haltingly. There was half a dozen of them, among even more mauled to death already or turned into zombies, squirming ceaselessly.

She was upon them like a frightened nurse, flitting to and fro, twitching to help. "Doomguy!" She turned around, her expression uncharacteristically helpless. "We should help hem!"

"Yes, we should," I replied, switching to my sidearm, making my intent crystal clear.

Her face went pale with horror. "I... I mean, we must save them..."

"And we will." I grit, suppressing emotions while cocking the slide. Because I wasn't a stone block either. But this had to be done.

"Wait! Stop!" She threw her palm up in a universal stopping motion. "No... I understand. Leaving them suffer is beyond cruel, and we may never have enough healing items..." She was beginning to cry, tears making messy tracks through the blood crusted on her face. "But... What if... We should at least try first!"

"Even if that means causing them agony?" I asked, lowering my sidearm. "Look at them - no, _look_ at them. They are stuck firmly. How much force, do you think, is necessary to pry them free?"

"Ew..." She did as told and failed to suppress a shiver. "Well, pain is just pain. It passes. Had I chickened out that time instead of hopping all three miles back with a broken leg, I wouldn't be here. We should try!"

I looked her in the eye. There was resolve, despite tears still flowing freely. I walked around the prisoners, assessing how better to pull them off. "Three miles with a broken leg?" I said, just to distract my companion.

"Well, I wasn't as prudent and careful as I should have been, back when I was thirteen," she admitted following me like a puppy. "But I think I caused Uncle Mimic more pain than myself."

Oh, the horrors of raising kids. I felt for the man, whoever he was. Logically thinking, skilled battle-ready maidens don't grow on trees, aren't they? Otherwise there would be more. The process must make normal parents gray early.

"All right," I said stopping at one of the impaled marines. He was clutching at his stake so tightly that the wood and his gloves were creaking. "Let's begin with this one. I pull at the upper body, you push at the legs."

Because if we cut the pole and tried this on the ground, we may never have enough grip on the slippery wood.

"All right!" She nodded furiously, grabbing at the guy's legs.

We pulled and pushed, the marine grunted in agony and it felt like would finally dislodge him when he suddenly broke apart. The chest pulled free, remaining in my hands, guts dangling below the diaphragm. The legs stayed in Shantae's grip, one arm under each knee. The rest... just unraveled unnaturally, splattering the determined maiden with blood and shit and guts.

"Ack!" she coughed, dropping the legs and wiping at her face, then looking up like she was tracing something rising with her eyes. "This could prove more hopeless than I thought."

"What do you mean?" I asked as I put the now nameless dead body down. The chips in their armor were all destroyed by the impalement, probably deliberately.

"Well, the spirit realms like this hell," she said trying to clean herself of gore, "they all have their own laws." She hair-whipped at the wall, making her ponytail clean again. "The natural philosophy of the human world... Make it worlds, only applies to a certain extent. It's... Let's just say spirit realms could be very dangerous for the weak-willed and the unprepared. I, myself, haven't even noticed because I'm very stubborn, or so my friends say, but as a rule of thumb humans have to be on alert, ready to assert themselves, or the realm's rules take hold."

"You mean, one has to exert willpower here just to say himself?" I asked. "Then deploying troops here is more dangerous than we thought!"

"More like exert willpower to keep existing under your own rules," she corrected. "I've already noticed, this world is skewed toward living things exploding gruesomely. So those who give up..."

"Accept this place's rules," I finished for her, looking down at the body parts and gore.

"So we could only save someone who hadn't given up," Shantae said straightening up. "I... I can't imagine myself holding for so long... It must hurt so much..."

I glanced back at the impaled guys. If my hunch was right, this could be even _more_ hopeless. Because why were they still alive? The stakes stem the bleeding, but that only goes so far. I had a suspicion this place was also skewed heavily towards suffering, thus keeping those with mortal wounds alive far longer than was natural. Was there even a clear line between us and the zombies who often sport gruesome wounds and sometimes even walk around and shoot without their heads?

We took hold of the next guy. "Duh... Don'.. bother..." he rasped, twitching. We pulled anyway. As he was going to budge... his innards came out of his ass, remaining on the stake while he slipped off without any resistance. He screamed in agony, then went limp.

"This one too," Shantae commented with sadness as she let go of the legs, following something invisible rising with her eyes.

"Are you sure?" I asked because the body was still twitching.

"Yeah," She sighed. "Didn't you see his soul depart?"

Say what...?

"I... can't see souls," I admitted cautiously.

"You can't?" She sounded surprised. "Then... Oh! Ooooh! This must be a special ability of mine, just like the inventory. And here I always assumed... Gah! We got no time for this! They are suffering!"

We tried the next guy, and the next, and the next, all expiring in various gruesome ways before they were off their stakes. Shantae was growing resigned, her face sullen. But she didn't let her determination waver.

The last one we gripped by route. I pulled, my companion pushed... This one was stuck more firmly than the rest. We strained, lifting the guy with all we got, he grunted in pain, we pulled even harder, he began budging... I was fully expecting him to explode into body parts, not come loose with a scream of agony.

We... did it?

I hurried to pull the marine off the stake and all but throw him to the floor, because there was a lot of blood streaming out, we had maybe seconds. Shantae threw a soul sphere at him. It merged with his body with a sound reminiscent of a chord. The flow of blood stopped. Shantae threw a blue armor power-up for a good measure. His armor glowed briefly, turning pristine. Even most of the grime fell off.

"We did it!" Shantae shouted with joy, prancing around like a bunny on steroids. Can't fault her.

"Of all the—" A woman's voice interrupted my train of thought. The marine we rescued took their helmet off revealing the face of a Greek goddess framed with short-cropped blonde hair. "Fly! Where did you find such a cute miracle-worker?"

"Arlene...?" One can't fault me for my disbelief. This was one of the best marines from from the same Allotech Division as me. "I thought no one from Mars survived!"

"Well, I thought too: no one, including me!" She grinned, standing up and turning to Shantae. "I feel like a brand-new woman, how did you do that?"

"Oh, I just used magical items collected here and there," demurred the blood-caked dancer.

"Meet Shantae," I said. "My sidekick and expert on supernatural matters. Shantae, meet corporal Arlene Shneider, the best marksman of our division."

"Glad to meet you," Shantae smiled at her. "You wouldn't believe how glad I am that we managed to save you!"

"Hah, I bet I'm glad _even more_ you did it!"

Shantae giggled. Then added: "And I'm not just his squire, I'm also his magic item bearer."

"Hey...!" Arlene finally noticed the elephant in the room. "You aren't speaking English!"

"Welcome to the club." I chuckled. "This translation effect is very convenient, considering the hell connects not just to our world. But take notice how meaning could change subtly. Between sidekick and squire, for example."

"Umm, it's the same word repeated twice, right?" Shantae said, confused.

"See what I mean?"

We walked out into the ruined hall.

"So nice to see the fuckers get what they deserved," Arlene commented with bloodthirsty glee. I saw Shantae's face fall a little. Yeah, sorry, kiddo, but even girls swear when they are marines. "Where's the rest of the army?"

"I'm... Sorry to say this," I began in a roundabout way, "But our counter-offensive faltered. No one expected there to be so many demons. So... There are now exactly two marines still deployed in Hell, performing sort of guerilla warfare. Someone has to find their leader and um..." I glanced at Shantae, "unleash a can of whoop-ass on him."

"Only you, Fly..." She shook her head. "So how about providing me with anything to fight with...? Come on, cough it up, I know your gimmick."

I parted with the railgun and one hundred cells. Shantae offered Arlene all her weapons saying she rarely used them at all. But Arlene's aptitude only allows her to hold one weapon in hammerspace, which was now taken by the railgun with its bulky ammo. And Shantae _did_ need something in case she found herself surrounded.

After trying this and that, passing weapons around, we stopped on this loadout: Arlene with assault rifle and bazooka slung over her shoulder, one spare drum on her belt, the rest of her pouches filled with spare magazines. The standard assault rifle may be too weak against meatier demons, but that's at medium to close distances. Its accuracy allows sniping them from afar, and even a baron could only take that many headshots. In short, the AR is very good for the warfare how it has been until the demons turned it on its head.

Shantae, in turn, got my two SMGs and all ammo for them. She would only use them at short distances. We made sure she could dual-wield easily, she surely had enough strenght for that, and if she needed reloading mid-battle it meant she was doing it wrong: her primary weapons were her magical sword-dash and her ability to dodge bullets.

I told Arlene all that briefly, to get her accustomed with our quirky companion. Also noted Shantae's tendencies of running ahead. The girl in question reacted self-consciously. Good.

Finally we found the lever that opened the grand doors. We came prepared for a fight, but were greeted by an empty yard. There was a central path framed by sickly-looking trees, shrubbery and fancy fountains gurgling blood. But not a single demon.

My attention, though, was on the multi-tiered city looming a ways ahead, its innumerable towers and spires making the cliffs it was perching on look like a hedgehog. And above that, dwarfing any other building, twin towers of a giant cathedral, like two daggers aimed at the burning sky shrouded by ragged black clouds.

"That," I said feeling an eager, bloodthirsty grin insinuate onto my face, "looks like the boss lair we were searching for."


End file.
